As if the residents of the Gulf Coast haven’t had it hard enough, the IRS is moving in to make sure they get their cut of any payouts from BP.  These government bureaucrats even have the chutzpah to pretend that their actions are benevolent and beneficial on the grounds that they are helping taxpayers understand […]

John Derbyshire of National Review has an interesting article on bureaucratic harassment of private business. He begins with a personal story of something that happened when he first came to the United States and was working at a food-preparation company: The first federal regulator I ever knew was a fellow named Ernie. …Ernie was a power […]

Barack Obama and Angela Merkel are the two main characters in what is being portrayed as a fight between American “stimulus” and European “austerity” at the G-20 summit meeting in Canada. My immediate instinct is to cheer for the Europeans. After all, “austerity” presumably means cutting back on wasteful government spending. Obama’s definition of “stimulus,” by […]

DeMint’s amendment to prevent the current rate on capital gains and dividends from increasing to 20 percent at the end of the year fell well short on Wednesday.  The only party defectors in the 40-57 defeat of the amendment were Democrat Ben Nelson, who supported the measure, and Republican George Voinovich, who opposed.  In a  […]

Regular readers of this blog know that big corporations often are enemies of free markets and individual liberty. So it is hardly suprising to know that the Business Roundtable, a lobby representing CEOs of major companies, supported the wasteful and ineffective stimulus pprogram in 2009 and the bloated new healthcare entitlement in 2010. Big companies, […]

It’s been amusing, in an I-told-you-so fashion, to follow the fiscal crises in Greece, Spain, and other European welfare states. And I feel like a voyeuristic ghoul as I observe the incredibly misguided bailout policies being adopted by the political elites (who are trying to bailout the business elites who made silly loans to corrupt nations […]

This new video from the Institute for Justice celebrates the backlash against the Supreme Court’s reprehensible Kelo decision that allowed politicians to seize private property for the benefit of commercial developers and other campaign contributors. The best part of the video comes shortly before the three-minute mark, when the narrator notes that the corrupt politicians […]

Jeff Jacoby righteously – and rightfully – condemns the moral perversion that allows people to overlook the barbaric cruelty and oppression of communism. If Jose Saramago, the Portuguese writer who died on Friday at 87, had been an unrepentant Nazi for the last four decades, he would never have won international acclaim or received the […]

As the chart below indicates, the United Kingdom has a large budget deficit solely because government spending has increased to record levels (OECD data). Unfortunately, the new Tory-Liberal coalition government has decided that taxpayers should be punished for all the over-spending that occurred when the Labor government was in charge. The Telegraph reports that the […]

I’ve frequently argued that the main purpose of “taxing the rich” is not to collect more revenue. Smart leftists, after all, understand that there are very strong Laffer Curve effects at the top of the income scale since investors and entrepreneurs have considerable ability to control the timing, level, and composition of their income. So […]