by Dan Mitchell | Aug 23, 2015 | Blogs, Economics
What’s the biggest economic fallacy on the left? What’s the defining mistake for our statist friends? One obvious answer is that many of them hold the anti-empirical belief that the economy is a fixed pie and that one person can’t climb the economic ladder unless...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 5, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Monetary Policy, Regulations
I appreciate tax havens for many reasons, mostly having to do with the importance of having some sort of external constraint on the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend. But I also like these low-tax jurisdictions for non-tax reasons. And high on my list...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 3, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Government Spending
Back in 2010, I described the “Butterfield Effect,” which is a term used to mock clueless journalists for being blind to the real story. A former reporter for the New York Times, Fox Butterfield, became a bit of a laughingstock in the 1990s for publishing a series of...
by Dan Mitchell | May 4, 2015 | Blogs, Economics
The standard argument against an easy-money policy is that it creates distortions in an economy that lead to either rapid increases in the price level, like we endured in the 1970s, or unsustainable asset bubbles, like we experienced last decade. Those arguments are...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 3, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Monetary Policy
During periods of economic weakness, governments often respond with “loose” monetary policy, which generally means that central banks will take actions that increase liquidity and artificially lower interest rates. I’m not a big fan of this approach. If an economy is...
