After reading below about Argentina’s decline, several people have emailed to ask how Chile compares. Ask and ye shall receive. This post from last month shows shows Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. Very powerful, which is why I gave the post such a grandiose title. ============================== There’s been a lot of coverage of the recent decision […]

Having just done a blog post where I explained that government should stay neutral in fights between labor and management in the private sector, let’s look at a real-world example to understand why. The millionaire owners and millionaire players from the National Football League are locked in a labor dispute. This is somewhat understandable since […]

Dana Milbank is a snarky leftist who writes for the Washington Post, but I have to give him credit for an amusing column today about the new big-brother diet guidelines from our incompetent federal government. Here are a few excerpts. In the late 1970s, before the government began telling us what to eat, 15 percent […]

The President garnered some attention for his January 18 column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he said we need to control the regulatory burden. Let’s start with the insincere part. He praised capitalism. America’s free market has not only been the source of dazzling ideas and path-breaking products, it has also been the […]

The news is going from bad to worse for Ireland.

I’ve already commented on Ireland’s woes, and opined about similar problems afflicting the rest of Europe, but the continuing deterioration of the Emerald Isle deserves further analysis so that American policy makers hopefully grasp the right lessons. Here are five things we should learn from the mess in Ireland.

I’ve already commented here and here on the government forcing us to use inferior lightbulbs. The bad news is becoming worse news. Here’s a story from England that was linked on Instapundit, showing how big business (which conspired with the politicians to get rid of high-quality incandescent bulbs) will now reap a windfall selling the […]

Walter Williams explains why politicians and bureaucrats shouldn’t have the power to tell us what we’re allowed to buy. At first blush, the mercantilists’ call for “free trade but fair trade” sounds reasonable. After all, who can be against fairness? Giving the idea just a bit of thought suggests that fairness as a guide for […]

The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced this morning that the unemployment rate jumped to 9.8 percent last month. As you can see from the chart, the White House claimed that if we enacted the so-called stimulus, the unemployment rate today would be about 7 percent. It’s never wise to over-interpret the meaning on a single […]