If you’re a regular reader, you already know I’m a big supporter of tax competition and tax havens. Here’s the premise: Politicians almost always are focused on their next election and this encourages them to pursue policies that are designed to maximize votes and power within that short time horizon. Unfortunately, this often results in very short-sighted […]

The headlines from today’s employment report certainly seem positive. The unemployment rate has dropped to 6.3 percent and there are about 280,000 new jobs.* But if you dig into the details of the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some less-than-exciting data. First, here is the chart showing total employment over the past […]

Using a comparison of Jamaica and Singapore, I recently argued that growth should trump inequality. Simply stated, a growing economic pie is much better for poor people that incentive-sapping redistribution programs that trap people in dependency. In other words, nations with smaller government and less intervention produce better results than nations with bloated governments and lots of meddling. You see […]

There’s a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,”  that supposedly identifies the Achilles’ Heel of the market economy. Piketty argues that the rate of return to capital is higher than the economy-wide growth rate and that this will lead to untenable inequality as the rich grab a larger […]

I periodically (some would say over and over and over again, though occasionally made more palatable by using humor and cartoons) warn that the United States should not become a European-style welfare state. But I wonder whether I spend enough time explaining why this would be a bad idea. After all, some people may think that you get more security and benefits with the […]

What happens when you mix something good with something bad? To be more specific, what happens when you have a big success story, like the spending cap in Switzerland that has dramatically slowed the growth of government, and then expect intelligent and coherent coverage by a government-run media outfit that presumably wants a bigger public sector? Well, the answer […]

Early last month, I wrote an article for The Federalist on job creation. I used that opportunity to document that there is a serious problem with jobs under Obama, and I explained that the problem existed in part because the President was intervening with so-called stimulus schemes. The far better approach is for government to “get out of the way.” […]

As a supporter of genuine capitalism, which means the right of contract and the absence of coercion, I don’t think there should be any policies that help or hinder unions. The government should simply be a neutral referee that enforces contracts and upholds the rule of law. Similarly, I also don’t have any philosophical objection to employers and employees […]

In the pre-World War I era, the fiscal burden of government was very modest in North America and Western Europe. Total government spending consumed only about 10 percent of economic output, most nations were free from theplague of the income tax, and the value-added tax hadn’t even been invented. Today, by contrast, every major nation has an onerous income […]

President Obama and many other leftist politicians are running around the nation claiming that supposedly greedy employers are deliberately choosing to reduce their profits. They’re not actually making that specific claim, but that’s what they’re asserting, for all intents and purposes, when they claim that women are not getting equal pay for equal work. If […]