Texas has a small state government and no state income tax. California has a bloated state government and a punitive state income tax. Here’s a simple quiz: Which state is doing better? The answer is obvious, as Michael Barone explains:  Democratic majorities have obediently done the bidding of public employee unions to the point that […]

I’m not sure how to categorize this story from England. Local governments are surreptitiously adding microchips to garbage cans to weigh the amount of rubbish each household is unloading. It is generally thought that this is the beginning stage of a government tax based on weight, though it’s also possible it could be somehow used […]

According to Financial Times report the politicians in Paris and Berlin want to set up some sort of European Monetary Fund to help bail out Greece and other profligate European nations. This is good news in the short run for American taxpayers since it is less likely that American taxpayers will be financing bailouts through […]

Andy Morriss, a professor at the University of Illinois Law School, is having a debate about so-called green jobs at The Economist. For some strange reason, the British magazine picked the nutjob Van Jones as his opponent (you may remember that he was forced to resign from the Obama White House after he was exposed […]

During the Cold War era, there was something known as the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was the notion that once a nation was taken over by communists, there was no going back. A similiar principle takes place in the battle between statism and freedom in America. The left understands that once people get hooked on government […]

The left pretends to care about fairness, but they have no problem taking money from ordinary people to help fatten the wallets of overpaid government bureaucrats. Pat Buchanan asks what’s fair about redistributing from the poor to the rich: …government work is becoming a sweet deal for those who can get it, which may explain […]

A former colleague from my days at the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, has a very disturbing article at National Review Online. Robert explains that the Obama Administration is putting together a new – and rigged – definition of poverty that has nothing to do with material deprivation. This new system instead will be a measure […]

An incredible 93 percent of voters in Iceland voted against financing British and Dutch bank bailouts. The politicians in England and the Netherlands argued that they were bailing out local subsidiaries of an Icelandic bank, so Iceland’s taxpayers should pick up the tab, but those branches was operating under the rules of the European Economic […]

A solid analysis by a reporter finds that bureaucrats make almost $8,000 more than their private sector counterparts, but the bigger scandal is the giant gap in fringe benefits. Taxpayers cough up nearly $41,000 for every bureaucrat, but workers in the productive sector of the economy get an average of less than $10,000: Federal employees […]

 As usual, Tom Sowell uses basic economics to explain a confusing topic. His core insight is that government has undermined market forces, which is leading to rising costs. Obama and the other statists somehow think more government will make things better: …policies based on political hype over the years are what have gotten us into […]