Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer.   The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and blasted the right of individual countries to be fiscally sovereign.  The following Associated […]

I think it is very nice when left-wing groups publish reports that make the case for pro-market policies A recent example is a report from the Center for International Policy, which wants to demonize so-called tax havens, but their report shows that the United States is actually the biggest beneficiary of tax haven policies, with […]

Here’s a story to warm the hearts of struggling taxpayers around the nation. Washington, DC, is one of the few spots in the nation where income is climbing. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Personal income in 42 states fell in 2009, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Nevada’s 4.8% plunge was the steepest, as construction […]

Everyone’s favorite bureaucracy really stepped in it recently, when they harassed a car wash owner for an upaid tax bill of (drumroll please) four cents. But since we’re talking about the Internal Revenue Service, the bureaucrats also tacked on an extra $200 to the bill – even though the owner had never been notified of […]

Sleazy political behavior does not necessarily require a bag of money being handed to a poltician in a deserted parking garage. Sometimes it is blatantly visible. A good example is the European version of “cap-and-trade” climate legislation. While the legislation produced lots of criminal activity, it also enabled big European companies to game the system, […]

I actually think this it is unfair to highlight Fidel Castro’s endorsement of Obamacare, but I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve started a diet, so I’ll simply twist the knife a bit by noting that we probably could improve American healthcare by imposing Cuban-style rationing. I imagine many of our obesity-related health problems would disappear […]

I don’t seem to be as depressed as everyone else about Obamacare, in part because our system is already so distorted and controlled by government that (this is my rough guess, to be sure) all we did was move from a system that is 68 percent run by government to a system that is 79 percent […]

Greece is in trouble for a combination of reasons. Government spending is far too excessive, diverting resources from more efficient uses. The bureaucracy is too large and paid too much, resulting in a misallocation of labor. And tax rates are too high, further hindering the productive sector of the economy. Europe’s political class wants to […]

I thought it was an outrage when it was reported that the unfunded liability for state government pension plans was about $500 billion, or perhaps even $1 trillion. I’m not even sure what to say about this item. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Biggs from the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the shortfall […]

Or maybe this belongs in the “great moments in international bureaucracy” series since it relates to European Union law. Regardless, we have another sign of Europe’s fiscal nightmare. A court in the United Kingdom has given a big green light to welfare tourism by ruling that a foreign citizen can get handouts based on children […]