I haven’t written much on the global-warming debate, other than to warn about how agenda-driven government funding is corrupting scientific inquiry and to mock nutjob extremists who assert climate change will cause catastrophes ranging from genocide to AIDS. But I feel compelled to address the issue today because of a despicable move by the Australian […]

As a grumpy libertarian, I routinely get agitated about taxes, spending, and regulation. As far as I’m concerned, much of government is a racket that uses coercion to reward interest groups with unearned wealth. But there are degrees of evil. So if you asked me to pick the most reprehensible thing that government does,  “asset […]

One of the tax increases buried in Obamacare was an onerous and intrusive “1099″ scheme that would have required businesses to collect tax identification numbers for just about any vendor and then send paperwork to the IRS whenever they did more than $600 of business. Send one of your sales people to New York for […]

Here’s the kind of story that makes me fear for the future of the nation. It is a disturbing example of both government stupidity and soft tyranny. The police may not be ticketing for smoking in the parks, but they are still ticketing parker visitors for crimes like…eating a doughnut in a playground. Yup, this […]

I’ve been battling the Organization for Economic Cooperation for years, ever since the Paris-based bureaucracy unveiled its “harmful tax competition” project in the late 1990s. Controlled by Europe’s high-tax welfare states, the OECD wants to prop up the fiscal systems of nations such as Greece and France by hindering the flow of jobs and capital […]

I’ve never met Robert Murphy, but he is a reprehensible person. I don’t know if he’s as bad as Michael Wolfensohn, but he’s definitely a sorry excuse for a human being. For all I know, Mr. Murphy goes to church every day, volunteers at a homeless shelter, reads books for the blind, and picks up […]

I don’t know whether to be amused, disgusted, or angry, but any politician who says we need higher taxes is crazy so long as the federal government is squandering even one penny on sting operations designed to interfere with the freedom of consenting adults to busy and sell unpasteurized milk. Here are some excerpts from […]

My previous post looked at the federal government’s troubling decision to investigate, persecute, prosecute, and ultimately imprison a random home-loan borrower named Charlie Engle for the crime of mortgage fraud. Citing a column on the legal fallout from the financial crisis in the New York Times, I noted that it was rather odd that the […]

Joe Nocera has a must-read story in the New York Times about how the legal fallout from the financial crisis. His basic theme is that the government let all the bigwigs get away with their crimes, but then has a fascinating discussion about how the government targeted an inconsequential mortgage borrower. I’m not sure I […]

You readers have been presented with a series of challenging quizzes on topics such as Sharia law, healthcare,  incest, and vigilante justice. Let’s now shift to the world of taxation. We all know governments routinely make life hard for taxpayers. The IRS, for example, is a rather brutal bureaucracy, as explained in this video. But […]