by Dan Mitchell | Jan 28, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Financial Privacy, Regulations
People are getting increasingly agitated about being spied on by government. The snoops at the National Security Agency have gotten the most attention, and those bureaucrats are in the challenging position of trying to justify massive invasions of our privacy when...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 1, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics
At the beginning of the year, I was asked whether Europe’s fiscal crisis was over. Showing deep thought and characteristic maturity, my response was “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, are you ;@($&^#’% kidding me?” But I then shared specific reasons for pessimism, including the...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 1, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Europe, Government Spending
We’re making a tiny bit of progress in the battle against the welfare state. No, policy hasn’t changed yet, but at least there’s growing recognition that maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to pay people not to work. Particularly when you trap them in lives of...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 27, 2013 | Blogs, Europe, Taxation
I’m not a big fan of the European Commission. For those not familiar with this entity, it’s sort of the European version of the executive-branch bureaucracy we have in Washington. And like their counterparts in Washington, the Brussels-based bureaucracy enjoys a very...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 21, 2013 | Big Government, Blogs, Government Spending
As illustrated by this chart, economists are lousy forecasters. To be more specific, economists are no better than fortune tellers when trying to make short-run macroeconomic forecasts. Heck, if we actually knew what was going to happen over the next 12 months, we’d...
