While I mostly focus on bad government policy in the United States, I also think we can learn lessons from what’s happening in other nations. In some cases, I share positive stories, such as the success of privatized Social Security in Australia, nationwide school choice in Sweden, and genuine spending cuts in the Baltic nations. In most cases, though, I’m pointing […]
read more...The new leftist website, Vox, has an article by Sarah Kliff on Vermont’s experiment with a single-payer healthcare system. But I don’t really have much to say about what’s happening in the Green Mountain State, other than to declare that I much prefer healthcare experiments to occur at the state level. Indeed, we should reform Medicaid andMedicare and also fix the […]
read more...Last month, I shared a very interesting video from Canada’s Fraser Institute that explored the link between economic performance and the burden of government spending. There’s now an article in the American Enterprise Institute’s online magazine about this research. The first half of the article unveils the overall findings, explaining that there is a growth-maximizing size of government (which, […]
read more...There’s an old joke about two guys camping in the woods, when suddenly they see a hungry bear charging over a hill in their direction. One of the guys starts lacing up his sneakers and his friend says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” The other guys says, I don’t have to […]
read more...While Canadians are defensive about their health care system, and often times hold it up as a superior model, tens of thousands nevertheless voted with their feet in 2013 for America’s quasi-market system. Each year the Fraser Institute surveys physicians across 12 major medical specialties how many of their patients received non-emergency care abroad in […]
read more...Back in February, I said Australia probably was the country most likely to survive and prosper as much of the world suffered fiscal collapse and social chaos. In hindsight, I probably should have mentioned Canada as an option, in part because of pro-growth reforms in the past two decades that have significantly reduced the burden […]
read more...In this appearance on Canadian TV, I debunk anti-sequester hysteria, pointing out that “automatic budget cuts” merely restrain government so that it grows $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion. I also point out that we shouldn’t worry about government employees getting a slight haircut since federal bureaucrats are overcompensated. Moreover, […]
read more...I’m not quite ready to trade places with Canada, but it may just be a matter of time. Like Germany and Sweden, they seem to be slowly but surely trying to move in the right direction. I’ve already commented on good Canadian fiscal policy (including a much-needed lesson for Paul Krugman), and I’ve also praised […]
read more...Demonstrating that he’s probably not a fan of Mitchell’s Golden Rule, Paul Krugman recently asserted that fiscal austerity has failed in the United Kingdom. Citing Keynesian theory and weak economics numbers, he warned about “the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion” and says that the British government made a mistake when it decided […]
read more...Since I’ve written before about Canada’s remarkable period of fiscal restraint during the 1990s, I am very pleased to see that the establishment press is finally giving some attention to what our northern neighbors did to reduce the burden of government spending. Here are some key passages from a Reuters story. “Everyone wants to know […]
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