The German Chancellor and French President have put together a plan to boost growth. Sounds like a good goal, but what specifically are they proposing? Some of the obvious ideas include: Lowering tax rates to boost incentives for productive behavior. Reducing the burden of government spending to allow more efficient allocation of labor and capital. […]

I don’t blame the Democrats for wanting to seduce Republicans into a tax-increase trap. Indeed, I completely understand why some Democrats said their top political goal was getting the GOP to surrender the no-tax-hike position. I’m mystified, though, why some Republicans are willing to walk into such a trap. If you were playing chess against […]

I realize this is about as productive as talking to a brick wall, but I’m going to explain some basic economics to statist French policymakers (oops, pardon the redundancy). This heroic – albeit surely futile – impulse is triggered by a recent proposal from President Sarkozy to supposedly boost job creation by lowering payroll taxes […]

Late last year, Spanish voters kicked out a socialist government and elected a new government led by the supposedly conservative People’s Party. Is that translating into smaller government and more freedom? Doesn’t look that way. It seems that Spanish right-of-center politicians are just as useless and statist as the faux conservatives in Germany, France, and […]

Last January, I identified five things that worried me for 2011. Here’s what had me concerned, along with some ex post facto analysis about whether I was right to fret: 1. A back-door bailout of the states from the Federal Reserve – Thankfully, I was way off base with this concern. Not only was there […]

I’m not a big fan of the European bureaucracy. Indeed, I was semi-serious when I stated that Brussels was the “most statist place on the planet.” Which is why I greatly enjoyed this speech by the head of Ryan Air, who ripped the bureaucrats a new you-know-what while speaking at an event sponsored by the […]

I have many frustrations in my life, and near the top of the list is the conservative fixation about balancing the budget. This view is very misguided. Red ink isn’t good, but the fiscal problem in America (as well as Europe, Japan, etc) is that the public sector is too big. Milton Friedman was right […]

I’ve written a couple of serious posts about the European fiscal crisis, including an explanation of how the problem could be solved and one about the importance of gun ownership in case the pessimists are right and civil society collapses. But something funny would make this day better and this Hitler parody is the best […]

Europe is in the midst of a fiscal crisis caused by too much government spending, yet many of the continent’s politicians want the European Central Bank to purchase the dodgy debt of reckless welfare states such as Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal in order to prop up these big government policies. So it’s especially noteworthy […]

There’s always been a simple and desirable solution to Europe’s fiscal crisis, but nobody in Europe wants to do the right thing because it means admitting the failure of big government and it would result in less power for the political elite. So we get the spectacle of never-ending emergency summits as the political class […]