I don’t know what’s more laughable, the fact that some EU bureaucracy is creating an 80-minute poem (with dancing, no less), or that the “low-grade bank clerk” who masquerades as the European Council President is going to publish a a book of haiku poems. But only one item is objectionable, and that’s the latter since […]

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, my Cato Institute colleague Alan Reynolds offers a simple economics lesson about pitfalls of class-warfare tax policy:  …the evidence is clear that when marginal tax rates go up, the amount of reported incomes goes down. Economists call that “the elasticity of taxable income” (ETI), and measure it by examining […]

This chart, published in the New York Times and based on work by Andrew Biggs of the American Enterprise Institute, shows the states with the most serious debt problems. Maybe I don’t follow state issues closely enough, but I was surprised to find that Alaska had the most debt and that California was not very […]

No, that’s not the name of a new TV series. We should be so lucky. Instead, it’s a good description of the government’s approach to tobacco. Instead of letting adults make up their own minds about costs and benefits of risky choices (which includes most things in life, such as crossing a street and eating […]

Tom Palmer of the Altas Network has a very concise – yet quite devastating – video exposing the Keynesian fallacy that the destruction of wealth by calamaties such as earthquakes or terrorism is good for economic growth. Tom cites the work of Bastiat, who sagely observed that, “There is only one difference between a bad […]

This story from the Daily Caller about colleges helping kids sign up for food stamps, got me completely depressed. It’s not so much that this is indicative of a bloated, out-of-control government, though it is. It’s more that this symbolizes how the social capital of the nation is being eroded by the moocher mentality. Welfare should […]

USA Today reports on a study showing that payments to donors would significantly increase the supply of kidneys available for transplant. Such a system potentially could save thousands of lives per year, so it is perplexing that statists are so viscerally opposed. The only interpretation I can come up with – which I admit is very uncharitable […]

This Associate Press story really bolsters my confidence in the public sector. I can’t wait for geniuses like this to be in charge of determining what health care procedures are acceptable:  Fifteen phony products – including a gasoline-powered alarm clock – won a label from the government certifying them as energy efficient in a test […]

There’s been a bit of buzz about a recent story in Politico revealing a huge increase in the number of congressional staff receiving six-figure salaries.  Some of the details are eye-openers, including a 39 percent increase in the past four years in the number of staffers earning at least $163,358: Nearly 2,000 House of Representatives […]

George Will argues that the answer should be no. I’m not a lawyer, but I think he makes a compelling case regardless of how one feels about immigration in general or the specific issue of how to deal with illegals: A simple reform…would bring the interpretation of the 14th Amendment into conformity with what the […]