by Dan Mitchell | Apr 30, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Using a comparison of Jamaica and Singapore, I recently argued that growth should trump inequality. Simply stated, a growing economic pie is much better for poor people that incentive-sapping redistribution programs that trap people in dependency. In other words,...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 29, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
There’s a new book by French economist Thomas Piketty, called “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” that supposedly identifies the Achilles’ Heel of the market economy. Piketty argues that the rate of return to capital is higher than the economy-wide growth rate and...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 11, 2014 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
In the pre-World War I era, the fiscal burden of government was very modest in North America and Western Europe. Total government spending consumed only about 10 percent of economic output, most nations were free from theplague of the income tax, and the value-added...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 14, 2014 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market
My favorite Heritage Foundation publication (other than…ahem…my studies on government spending and the flat tax) is the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Like the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World and the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 11, 2014 | Blogs, Economics
If you ask an economist about the difference between capitalism and socialism, you’ll probably get a boring answer about the size of government, the impact on incentives, and the power of the state. Or maybe you’ll get a nit-picking answer, sort of like when I...
