by Dan Mitchell | Aug 28, 2015 | Blogs, Free Market
At the risk of stereotyping, the Chinese people are remarkably productive when given the chance. Hong Kong and Singapore are dominated by ethnic Chinese, and those jurisdictions routinely rank among the world’s top economies. Taiwan is another high-performing economy...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 19, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
I’m a huge fan of the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World. I always share the annual rankings when they’re released and I routinely cite EFW measures when writing about individual countries. But even a wonky economist like me realizes that there is more...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 11, 2015 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market
When I first got to Washington in the mid-1980s, one of the big issues was the supposedly invincible Japanese economy. Folks on the left claimed that Japan was doing well because the government had considerable power to micro-manage the economy with industrial policy....
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 30, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Folks on the left sometimes act as if the Nordic nations somehow prove that big government isn’t an impediment to prosperity. As I’ve pointed out before, they obviously don’t spend much time looking at the data. So let’s give them a reminder. Here are the rankings...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 16, 2015 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
The proper view on inequality is that it doesn’t matter. That assumes, of course, that people are earning their income honestly rather than via government-enabled cronyism. To elaborate, some people will become rich in a system of honest and competitive markets, but...
