A couple of weeks ago, I proposed a “Golden Rule of Fiscal Policy” that was probably a bit too wordy. Good fiscal policy exists when the private sector grows faster than the public sector, while fiscal ruin is inevitable if government spending grows faster than the productive part of the economy. In some recent speeches, […]
read more...The Europeans have just agreed to another bailout for Greece. That’s the bad news. The good news is…well, there is no good news. Sarkozy, Merkel, and the other statists have once again failed to do the right thing and instead have decided to throw good money after bad and dig the debt hole even deeper. […]
read more...Professor Allan Meltzer of Carnegie Mellon University has a must-read column in today’s Wall Street Journal, beginning with what should be an obvious statement. Those who heaped high praise on Keynesian policies have grown silent as government spending has failed to bring an economic recovery. Except for a few diehards who want still more government […]
read more...Folks of a certain age, who watched ABC’s Wide World of Sports, will remember the phrase “the agony of defeat.” Well, that’s what Richard Epstein and I endured Tuesday night at the Intelligence Squared debate in New York City. We were battling against two Keynesians, Mark Zandi and Cecilia Rouse, in hopes of convincing the […]
read more...One of the reasons I’m a libertarian is that virtually all of my personal interactions with government are unpleasant. * Governments pull me over and give me tickets for trying to efficiently drive from one location to another. * Governments coerce me into filling out complicated tax forms in order to give politicians money that […]
read more...A couple of months ago, after reading an excellent column in the semi-official newspaper of the Vatican, I joked that we should send Obama to Rome for an economics lesson. I now completely retract that statement. There may be some economically astute people who write for L’Osservatore Romano, but they are offset by the economic […]
read more...Almost two years ago, I wrote that bailing out Greece was misguided because it would dig the debt hole deeper. More recently, I wrote an I-told-you-so post that looked at my four original predictions and patted myself on the back for being accurate (not that it took any special insight to conclude that bailouts would […]
read more...I would have structured this flowchart differently, for reasons I discuss in this post, but this is pretty good picture of why Europe is in trouble. They say all roads lead to Rome, and this flowchart shows all roads lead to a banking crisis (see this post to understand why). But not all banking crises […]
read more...Just yesterday, I proposed a “Golden Rule” for fiscal policy, based on the simple notion that the burden of government spending should grow slower than the private sector. And regular readers know about my narcissistic attempt to publicize “Mitchell’s Law” as a way of illustrating how politicians create problems and then use those problems to […]
read more...Sounds like the beginning of a joke, sort of like, “A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar…” But I have a serious point to make. I’m currently in Anguilla (yes, this is just one of the sacrifices I make in the fight for liberty), where I just gave a speech to […]
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