Here’s some horrifying news from the United Kingdom, where the government-run healthcare system allowed 239 patients to die of malnutrition in 2007. Another 8,000-plus entered the system for malnutrition and actually deteriorated. In 2007, 239 patients died of…
Daily Analysis
If Professors Really Believe in Socialism, Why Don’t They Try this Classroom Experiment?
This little story appeared in my inbox. It’s obviously meant to illustrate the perverse incentive structure created by redistribution, but one wonders why statists in the academic world don’t follow through on their convictions and use this grading system. A professor…
Obama’s Class-Warfare Tax Policy Will Hit Small Business
Kevin Hassett and Alan VIard of the American Enterprise Institute have a column in the Wall Street Journal showing how Obama’s proposed tax hikes will impose significant harm on small business owners and other entrepreneurs. Higher tax rates are damaging for the…
A Basic – but Critical – Economics Lesson from Walter Williams
Just because something is free, that doesn’t mean there is no cost. This is the core message of Walter Williams’ column, which uses the example of “employer-paid” Social Security taxes to explain how politicians specialize in giving us very expensive things for…
Will Entitlements, Handouts, and other Government Programs Turn America into a Nation of Sheep?
If you saw the Wall-E movie, you may remember how people morphed into helpless blobs because all their needs were being fulfilled by something called BNL. I realize I’m a quirky libertarian, but the movie made me think about how excessive government is doing something…
Smoke for the Motherland
Excise taxes, where government taxes the sale of particular goods, are usually levied with the excuse that consumption of a good or engagement in a certain activity is harmful for individuals. If this were actually true, you’d expect government bureaucrats to…
Get the Government Out of the Business of Embryonic Stem-Cell Research
As is so often the case, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head, asking why taxpayers should be forced to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The moral issues in this debate are very important, to be sure, but Jacoby’s column takes a different…
Crocodile Dundee vs Australia’s Tax Police
Here’s a Reuters story about the Australian Tax Office harassing Paul Hogan, better known to Americans as Crocodile Dundee, because of a tax dispute. The grinches at the tax office took advantage of Hogan’s return for his mother’s funeral to hold him hostage, refusing…
Why Can’t America Copy Europe’s Welfare States and Have a Low Corporate Tax Rate?
I tangle with my old nemesis Christian Weller, one of the statists at the Center against American Progress, in a debate on whether the corporate tax rate should be reduced. I was somewhat amused that Christian defended the current system because companies currently…
More Arguments Against a Value-Added Tax
The biggest long-term threat to fiscal responsibility is a value-added tax, as I’ve explained here, here, here, here, and here. So I’m delighted to see a growing amount of research showing that a VAT is bad news. Jim Powell has an excellent column at Investor’s…