When I wrote recently that the IRS was corrupt, venal, and despicable, I didn’t realize that I was bending over backwards to be overly nice. Every new revelation in the scandal shows that the agency is beyond salvage. Writing for Real Clear Markets, Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Manhattan Institute is appropriately skeptical of the IRS. Coincidentally, Lerner’s computer crashed […]
read more...It’s not as sophisticated as Professor Bryan Caplan’s Purity Quiz and it doesn’t have the simple elegance of the World’s Smallest Political Quiz, but at least you don’t need to answer any questions to see where you stand in this Venn Diagram that my intern shared with me. We don’t know who created it, but it’s a clever […]
read more...Since I’m a public finance economist, I realize I’m supposed to focus on big-picture issues such as tax reform and entitlement reform. And I do beat those issues to death, so I obviously care about controlling the size and power of government. But I like to think I’m also a decent human being. And this is why I […]
read more...Even though I’m personally a prude on the issue of drugs, that doesn’t stop me from opposing the Drug War, both for moral and practical reasons. After all, how can any sensible and decent person want laws that produce these outrageous results? The DEA trying to confiscate a commercial building because a tenant sold some marijuana. The government […]
read more...Senator Rand Paul is being criticized and condemned by the Washington establishment. That’s almost certainly a sign that he’s doing the right thing. And given the recent events in Russia and Ukraine, we should say he’s doing a great thing. This is because Senator Paul is waging a lonely battle to stop the unthinking and […]
read more...Two years ago, I shared a video about the Environmental Protection Agency’s brutal and thuggish tactics against an Idaho family. That story had a very happy ending because the Supreme Court struck a blow for property rights and unanimously ruled against the EPA (too bad that similarly sound analysis was absent when the Justices decided the Kelo case). […]
read more...We’ve reached the stage where Obamacare is the punchline to a bad joke. The law has been a disaster, both for the economy and for the Democratic Party. Not that we should be surprised. You don’t get better healthcare with a poisonous recipe of higher taxes, added government spending, and more intervention. With any luck, Obamacare will be a textbook […]
read more...One of the many differences between advocates of freedom and supporters of statism is how they view “rights.” Libertarians, along with many conservatives, believe in the right to be left alone and not molested by government. This is sometimes referred to in the literature as “negative liberty,” which is just another way of saying “the absence […]
read more...Last June, in response to a question about indiscriminate spying by the National Security Agency, I made two simple points about the importance of judicial oversight and cost-benefit analysis. I want – at a minimum – there to be judicial oversight whenever the government spies on American citizens, but I also think some cost-benefit analysis is appropriate. […]
read more...President Obama thinks he can prevail in the government shutdown fight by deliberately making life as difficult as possible for the maximum number of ordinary Americans. We’ve seen this before. After suffering a defeat on the sequester, he made himself a laughingstock with his Chicken-Little warnings that a tiny bit of fiscal restraint would grind […]
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