Tax-news.com reports that the French and Italian governments want Europe to impose a tax on imports from nations that don’t adopt misguided climate-change/global-warming rules. This is awful policy, but the good news is that such a policy presumably won’t happen unless all 27 European Union nations agree: France and Italy have demanded that the European […]

A former White House speechwriter, Mark Thiessen, has jumped to the defense of his former boss, writing for the Washington Post that George W. Bush “established a conservative record without parallel.” Even by the loose standards of Washington, that is a jaw-dropping assertion. I’ve been explaining for years that Bush was a big-government advocate, even writing […]

Tom Palmer of the Altas Network has a very concise – yet quite devastating – video exposing the Keynesian fallacy that the destruction of wealth by calamaties such as earthquakes or terrorism is good for economic growth. Tom cites the work of Bastiat, who sagely observed that, “There is only one difference between a bad […]

USA Today reports on a study showing that payments to donors would significantly increase the supply of kidneys available for transplant. Such a system potentially could save thousands of lives per year, so it is perplexing that statists are so viscerally opposed. The only interpretation I can come up with – which I admit is very uncharitable […]

Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer.   The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and blasted the right of individual countries to be fiscally sovereign.  The following Associated […]

I actually think this it is unfair to highlight Fidel Castro’s endorsement of Obamacare, but I’m in a grumpy mood because I’ve started a diet, so I’ll simply twist the knife a bit by noting that we probably could improve American healthcare by imposing Cuban-style rationing. I imagine many of our obesity-related health problems would disappear […]

While the politicians in Washington are poised to undermine the healthcare system with additional layers of taxes, spending, and regulation, Steven Chapman proposes to use markets to improve a part of the system that is suffering from a punitive form of price controls. Orgain donors are allowed zero compensation for their sacrifice. This policy – […]

My Cato colleague Jose Pinera makes a powerful argument for “privatizing” Social Security, which is something that has happened in about 30 nations. My Ph.D. dissertation was on Australia’s private system, so I’ve always had a soft spot for this issue. Sadly, Washington is busy creating new entitlements instead of fixing the ones we already […]

Dan Mitchell doesn’t get to talk until after the 3-minute mark, but he then explains why Obamacare will undermine the healthcare system. His basic point is that government intervention is the reason why the current system has problems, and that those problems will get worse by adding even more government.

Do my eyes deceive me? Has you-know-what frozen over? Something strange clearly has happened in the universe, because the Washington Post’s editorial page has published a very sensible piece about the Postal Service, noting the system is fundamentally unsound and stating that privatization is the only realistic long-term option: Approaching the limits of its federal […]