Montgomery County in Maryland is not exactly a hotbed of free market thinking or a bastion of limited government. It’s one of the richest counties in the nation, but not because of entrepreneurship and wealth creation. Instead, it’s a bedroom community for over-paid bureaucrats, corrupt lobbyists, fat-cat contractors, and other ne’er-do-wells who commute into Washington […]
read more...I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies, particularly the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD, funded by American tax dollars, has become infamous for its support of statist pro-Obama policies. The OECD has allied itself with the nutjobs from the so-called Occupy movement to push for bigger government and higher taxes. […]
read more...Considering that every economic theory agrees that living standards and worker compensation are closely correlated with the amount of capital in an economy (this picture is a compelling illustration of the relationship), one would think that politicians – particularly those who say they want to improve wages – would be very anxious not to create […]
read more...As part of his campaign to expand the size and scope of the federal government (and to justify his advocacy of class-warfare taxation), President Obama has been asserting that all of us benefit from government spending. It’s why he now echoes Elizabeth Warren’s claim that entrepreneurs owe their success to government programs and activities. It’s […]
read more...Mitt Romney is being criticized for supporting “territorial taxation,” which is the common-sense notion that each nation gets to control the taxation of economic activity inside its borders. While promoting his own class-warfare agenda, President Obama recently condemned Romney’s approach. His views, unsurprisingly, were echoed in a New York Times editorial. President Obama raised…his proposals […]
read more...The mess in Europe has been rather frustrating, largely because almost everybody is on the wrong side. Some folks say they want “austerity,” but that’s largely a code word for higher taxes. They’re fighting against the people who say they want “growth,” but that’s generally a code word for more Keynesian spending. So you can […]
read more...One of the reasons why this blog is called International Liberty is that the world is a laboratory, with some nations (such as France) showing why statism is a mistake, other jurisdictions (such as Hong Kong) showing that freedom is a key to prosperity, and other countries (such as Sweden) having good and bad features. […]
read more...I’ve run across very few good cartoons about Keynesian economics. If my aging memory is correct, I’ve only posted two of them. But at least they’re both very good. We have one involving Obama, sharks, and a lifeboat, and another one involving an overburdened jockey. Now we have a third cartoon to add to the […]
read more...I’m in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I just finished speaking to a regional conference of the European Students for Liberty. I subjected the kids to more than 90 minutes of pontificating and 73 PowerPoint slides, but I could have saved them a lot of time if I simply showed them this Rahn Curve video and then […]
read more...Last month, I exposed some major errors that Paul Krugman committed when he criticized Estonia for restraining the burden of government spending. My analysis will be helpful since I am now in Estonia for a speech about economic reform, and I wrote a column that was published yesterday by the nation’s main business newspaper. But […]
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