by Dan Mitchell | Dec 4, 2017 | Blogs, Economics
The late Mancur Olsen was a very accomplished academic economist who described the unfortunate tendency of vote-seeking governments to behave like “stationary bandits,” seeking to extract the maximum amount of money from taxpayers. I’m not nearly as sophisticated, so...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 7, 2017 | Big Government, Blogs
I wrote a four-part series about how governments are waging a war against cash, with the first two columns looking at why politicians are so interested in taking this radical step. In Part I, I looked at the argument that cash should be banned or restricted so...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 3, 2017 | Blogs, Financial Privacy, Taxation
Republicans promised voters all sorts of pro-growth reforms. They assured us that they learned a lesson about the dangers of expanding government and calling it “compassionate conservatism.” Give us control of both Congress and the White House, they said before the...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 16, 2017 | Blogs, Financial Privacy, Tax Competition, Taxation, VAT
Back in 2009, I shared the results of a very helpful study by Pierre Bessard of Switzerland’s Liberal Institute (by the way, “liberal” in Europe means pro-market or “classical liberal“). Pierre ranked the then-30 member nations of the Organization for Economic...
by Dan Mitchell | Feb 1, 2017 | Blogs, Financial Privacy
President Trump says he wants to roll back the burden of regulation. Give the morass of red tape that is strangling the economy, this is a very worthy goal. It’s also a daunting task. Fixing the sprawling regulatory state is the modern version of cleaning the Augean...
