Former Senator Phil Gramm had a column last week in the Wall Street Journal that deserves two blog posts. This first post highlights Gramm’s analysis showing that the U.S. has been very Keynesian compared to Europe, with numerous efforts to jump start the economy with deficit spending. But Senator Gramm hits the nail on the […]

Riots and protests have swept across Europe, as populations lured into government dependency are upset that there’s no longer enough money to maintain the existing level of redistribution. Here’s an excerpt from a BBC report: Tens of thousands of people from around Europe have marched across Brussels in a protest against spending cuts by some EU […]

I’m working on a serious blog post about European fiscal developments, but my research on that issue has alerted me to a couple of stories about President Jose Manuel Barroso that cry out for immediate mockery and abuse. Mr. Barroso, for those that don’t follow the exciting world of international bureaucracy, is the President of […]

I’ve never focused much on immigration issues, but this EU Observer story caught my eye. Libya’s dictator is asking the European Union to give his country €5 billion (more than $6 billion) each year as a price for stopping illegal migration across the Mediterranean. Mr Gaddafi suggested Monday during his speech to business representatives in […]

In a very predictable editorial this morning, the New York Times pontificated in favor of higher taxes. Compared to Paul Krugman’s rant earlier in the week, which featured the laughable assertion that letting people keep more of the money they earn is akin to sending them a check from the government, the piece seemed rational. But […]

If misery loves company, we can be very happy with these two stories about over-compensated bureaucrats from outside our borders. The first comes from Europe, where the Daily Telegraph reports that pension costs are skyrocketing for bureaucrats with the European Commission and other European Union entities. With the average pension being more than $88,000 per […]

Jim Glassman has a thorough article in Commentary explaining that Europe is in deep trouble both because high tax rates discourage work and production and because excessive handouts encourage sloth and dependency. This should be a common-sense observation, but most politicians get votes by convincing voters they can have comfortable lives without producing. The inevitable […]

It’s aggravating and maddening to send tax dollars to Washington and watch them get wasted on pork-barrel projects and inefficient programs. Imagine how much worse it would be, though, to send tax dollars to an international bureaucracy and be utterly helpless to stop the worst kinds of boondoggle spending. That’s how taxpayers from European nations […]

The Wall Street Journal correctly pulls aside the veil and exposes the dubious gimmick that European politicians used to declare that banks are reasonably health. To put it bluntly, they assumed no government would ever default, which really means that the stress test was a fraud or German taxpayers are now on the chopping block […]

Forget the Magna Carta and the Constitution. Finland is now on the cutting edge of protecting, promoting, and guaranteeing fundamental rights. As the BBC story excerpted below reports, Finland has announced that broadband access is now a legal right! Yes, you’re reading it here first. But not just the right to broadband. Apparently one megabit […]