Just because something is free, that doesn’t mean there is no cost. This is the core message of Walter Williams’ column, which uses the example of “employer-paid” Social Security taxes to explain how politicians specialize in giving us very expensive things for “free.” Scarcity means there’s no free lunch. Having more of one thing requires […]

As is so often the case, Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe hits the nail on the head, asking why taxpayers should be forced to fund embryonic stem-cell research. The moral issues in this debate are very important, to be sure, but Jacoby’s column takes a different approach and uses economic arguments to thoroughly debunk those […]

Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune makes several excellent points in his column on the recent salmonella scare, commenting on the absurd tendency to reward government bureaucracies that screw up. But more important, he explains that there are very strong incentives for safety in an unfettered marketplace. The fundamental issue, though, is that there is […]

The news that China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy has generated a lot of attention. It shouldn’t. There are roughly 10 times as many people in China as there are in Japan, so the fact that total gross domestic product in China is now bigger than total gross domestic product in Japan […]

Using road management as an example, John Stossel explains that government does a worse job than the private sector, even at things that theoretically are a government responsibility. Part of this is because of the profit motive, to be sure, but a big reason is probably because government bureaucracies inevitably are filled with overpaid bureaucrats […]

The fight for financial freedom and limited government is global. The Center for Freedom and Prosperity recognizes Eduardo Morgan Jr., an individual whose work for his native Panama echoes much of our own efforts to defend fiscal sovereignty from the onslaught of anti-growth taxation and regulation. As Panama’s Ambassador to Washington from 1996 to 1998, […]

John Goodman of the NCPA has a great article about how the current healthcare system is heavily distorted by government policies that result in people making decision with other people’s money (or at least what they perceive as other people’s money). The excerpt below is a good summary of John’s key points, but I’ll add […]

Free markets are characterized by voluntary exchange between buyers and sellers. Mapping that relationship is absurdly simply, as this image indicates. Indeed, the only reason I even bothered to include that image was for purposes of comparison. Here is a new flowchart prepared for the Joint Economic Committee showing the healthcare system under Obamacare.It’s worth […]

A major problem with America’s healthcare system, both before and after Obamacare, is the fact that consumers very rarely spend their own money when obtaining healthcare. Known as third-party payer, this problem exists in part because government directly finances almost 50 percent of healthcare expenditures. But even a majority of supposedly private healthcare spending is […]

Iain Murray writes at the Washington Examiner that advocacy groups Change.org and the Alliance for Climate Protection are arguing – in an email entitled, “Don’t Let BP Win!” – that “Stalling climate and energy legislation would be a big win for oil companies like BP, but a huge loss for the rest of us.”  Someone […]