There’s been a lot of discussion about Mitt Romney’s appeal – or lack thereof – among supporters of limited government. To put it mildly, many libertarians and conservatives are underwhelmed by his less-than-stellar record on healthcare, his weakness on Social Security reform, his anemic list of proposed budget savings, and his reprehensible support for ethanol […]

I’ve commented many times about wasteful government spending, including Social Security bureaucrats spending $700 thousand to party at a luxury resort, HUD bureaucrats giving huge subsidies for welfare recipients to live in upscale neighborhoods, rampant fraud in the unemployment insurance program, and tax dollars being used to subsidize a grown man wearing diapers and living […]

I have many frustrations in my life, and near the top of the list is the conservative fixation about balancing the budget. This view is very misguided. Red ink isn’t good, but the fiscal problem in America (as well as Europe, Japan, etc) is that the public sector is too big. Milton Friedman was right […]

Europe is in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by too much government spending, yet many of the continent’s politicians want the European Central Bank to purchase the dodgy debt of reckless welfare states such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal in order to prop up these big government policies. So it’s especially noteworthy […]

There’s always been a simple and desirable solution to Europe’s fiscal crisis, but nobody in Europe wants to do the right thing because it means admitting the failure of big government and it would result in less power for the political elite. So we get the spectacle of never-ending emergency summits as the political class […]

By European standards, Germany is in pretty good shape. There’s a very large welfare state and the tax burden is quite onerous, both of which hinder growth, but Germany has been more responsible than the United States in recent years. And while this may be damning with faint praise, this modest bit of fiscal discipline […]

I periodically write posts about “Great Moments” in government. These usually feature some absurd example of stupidity and incompetence that only is possible when the world’s least competent people have power to coerce. Examples include: EU rules banning the selling of items by quantity (can’t have people buying a dozen eggs, for instance); EEOC rules […]

In hopes of stopping investor panic about Europe’s fiscal crisis, the world’s major central banks just announced that they will do whatever is needed to ensure financial markets don’t freeze up. This could be an appropriate and relatively benign use of the lender-of-last-resort powers, or it could signal another round of reckless easy money and […]

This narrator probably won’t get rich, like the guy who did the “Girls Gone Wild” videos, but this is the second-best video I’ve ever seen on the bloated and overpaid government workforce. I especially like how he understands that the problem is the size of government, and I also admire his recognition that Republicans often […]