One of my first blog posts, back in 2009, featured Veronique de Rugy in a video, warning that America should not adopt the statist policies that caused so much damage in her home country of France. Sadly (but predictably), the politicians in Washington ignored Veronique’s sage advice. The burden of government has expanded since that […]

Republicans are telling voters that they’ve learned the hard lessons from the 2006 and 2008 elections and that they are back on the side of taxpayers. I’m not convinced, which is why I’ve outlined some key tests that will demonstrate whether the GOP genuinely supports limited government. o No tax increases, since more money for […]

Back in 2009, I got very excited when President Obama stated, “No business wants to invest in a place where the government skims 20 percent off the top.” Did that mean he wanted to reduce America’s punitive and anti-competitive corporate tax burden? Or maybe even fix the entire tax code and install a simple and […]

Europe is in shambles. Nations are going bankrupt. There are riots in the streets. So you would guess that the folks at the European Commission are focused on some big issues. But you would be wrong. The eurocrats in Brussels have much bigger fish to fry. They’re addressing the unmitigated horror of inadequate female representation […]

Taxes and spending are two of the most obvious burdens imposed by government, and I’m glad that many people are fighting against a political class that seems to have a limitless appetite for a bigger public sector. But politicians also can do great damage to an economy with mandates, regulations, and other forms of intervention. […]

Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.” I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here). And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast […]

I’ve explained on many occasions how the financial crisis was largely the result of government-imposed mistakes, and I’ve paid considerable attention to the role of easy money by the Federal Reserve and the perverse subsidies provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But I’ve only once touched on the role of the Basel regulations on […]

Remember my post from a week ago when I said I was not a Republican even though Ronald Reagan and Calvin Coolidge are two of my heroes? Well, now I have another reason to despise the GOP. Those reprehensible statists just voted to expand federal housing subsidies. Here are some excerpts from an excellent National Review column […]

I recently commented on some astounding numbers showing that each regulatory bureaucrat destroys 100 jobs in the productive sector of the economy. That’s obviously terrible news. Heck, it would be awful if each bureaucrat caused the destruction of 2 private-sector jobs. But here are some excerpts from a John Stossel column about how the bureaucrats […]

I’ve pointed out on several occasions that Herbert Hoover was a big-spending Keynesian. Heck, Hoover was pursuing failed Keynesian policies several years before Keynes produced his most well-known book, The General Theory. Hoover’s big spending was so pronounced that it generated this cartoon in 1932. Sadly, this cartoon applies just as well today. Except Bush […]