by Dan Mitchell | Apr 13, 2020 | Blogs, Europe
Libertarians and other supporters of limited government historically have mixed feelings about the European Union (and its various governmental manifestations). On the plus side, there are no trade barriers between nations that belong to the EU, and membership also...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 15, 2020 | Blogs, Europe, Health Care
I wrote recently how government regulation and bureaucratic inefficiency are hindering an effective response to coronavirus in the United States. And I also wrote yesterday about one foolish response from Washington to the crisis. But what about developments in other...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 26, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
I’ve warned many times that Italy is the next Greece. Simply stated, there’s a perfect storm of bad news. Government is far too big, debt is too high, and the economy is too sclerotic. I’ve always assumed that the country would suffer a full-blown fiscal crisis when...
by Dan Mitchell | May 20, 2018 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
As a general rule, we worry too much about deficits and debt. Yes, red ink matters, but we should pay more attention to variables such as the overall burden of government spending and the structure of the tax system. That being said, Greece shows that a nation can...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 29, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
The famous French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand supposedly said that a weakness of the Bourbon monarchs was that they learned nothing and forgot nothing. If so, the genetic descendants of the Bourbons are now in charge of Europe. But before explaining why,...
