As reported by the Financial Times, Sebastian Pinera, the brother of Cato’s Jose Pinera, was elected President of Chile this weekend. The press is viewing Pinera’s election through the right-left lens of Latin American politics, but this is a bit misleading since Chile has remained a very pro-market nation during nearly two decades of supposedly […]

While there is always a tendency in Washington to over-analyze the meaning of elections, I think that we can draw the following conclusions from Scott Brown’s victory: 1. Obamacare is an albatross for the Democrats. The White House wants to blame Coakley for being a bad candidate, but Massachusetts is a very left-wing state. Every […]

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Steve Moore notes that the Senate health care bill creates incentives for dual income couples to avoid marriage: Marriage is a revered institution in America but not apparently under the Congressional health care legislation, which contains steep “marriage penalty” taxes, i.e. tax burdens that only get heavier when a […]

I must confess that I didn’t think Scott Brown was going to win the election in Massachusetts, even though I predicted a 50-48 GOP victory. This is a monumental development. It doesn’t necessarily mean Obamacare can be stopped. And it may be that Brown turns out to be a big government squish, like Snowe in […]

The internal revenue codes is so mind-numbingly complex that even the head of the IRS uses a professional tax preparer. But that’s hardly a surprise. What is a bit shocking, though, is that Commissioner Shulman has the gall to claim that he favors tax code simplification when his IRS has been promulgating rules and regulations […]

The government is so incompetent that it never put the Christmas-day underwear-bomber on the no-fly list – even though the nutjob’s father reported his son’s radical views to American authorities. But the TSA for several years has targeted Mikey Hicks, a cub scout from New Jersey who is eight years old. Nobody got fired after […]

Do stores in low-income neighborhoods charge higher prices because of racism, or greed? That’s what some academics argue, but Tom Sowell points out that there are real economic factors that drive pricing decisions. The example below is about stores, but his IBD column also has a great example using financial services: Low-income neighborhoods tend to […]

This blog periodically makes fun of England (even though it is one of my favorite nations) for big government and political correctness, but these two stories caused my jaw to drop. First, the Daily Mail reports that a man was jailed for several hours because he was falsely suspected of writing an email that indirectly may have […]

  Academic research is fairly unanimous that high tax rates cause tax avoidance and tax evasion. Not many people, after all, are going to take big risks or engage in inefficient tax planning to escape Hong Kong’s low-rate flat tax. But people begin to figure out ways of keeping more of their money as tax […]

The Washington Times has an article exposing how a law firm is simultaneously doing legal work on a program for the government while also lobbying for more handouts from that program. Here’s an excerpt from the expose: One of the law firms hired to provide legal work for the Treasury Department on a multibillion-dollar federal […]