by Dan Mitchell | Sep 3, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market, Taxation
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...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 2, 2010 | Blogs, Free Market, Health Care
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...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 30, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market, Regulations
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...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 20, 2010 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
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...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 15, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market, Government Waste
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...
