After the financial crisis, the consensus among government officials was that we needed more regulation. This irked me in two ways. 1. I don’t want more costly red tape in America, particularly when the evidence is quite strong that the crisis was caused by government intervention. Needless to say, the politicians ignored my advice and […]

I’m not a big fan of the German government. Angela Merkel has a disturbing desire to impose fiscal and political union on the European continent. And even the supposedly free market Free Democratic Party seems perfectly comfortable with a gradual descent into statism. No wonder I mocked the Washington Post for labeling Germany a “fiscally […]

Several months ago, I wrote a rather wonky post explaining that the western world became rich in large part because of jurisdictional competition. Citing historians, philosophers, economists, and other great thinkers, I explained that the rivalry made possible by decentralization and diversity played a big role in both economic and political liberalization. In other words, […]

I spoke at the United Nations back in May, explaining that more government was the wrong way to help the global economy. But I guess I’m not very persuasive. The bureaucrats have just released a new report entitled, “In Search of New Development Finance.” As you can probably guess, what they’re really searching for is […]

If we want to avoid the kind of Greek-style fiscal collapse implied by this BIS and OECD data, we need some external force to limit the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend. That’s why I’m a big advocate of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy (read Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath to understand […]

Like Sweden and Denmark, Germany is a semi-rational welfare state. It generally relies on a market-oriented approach in areas other than fiscal policy, and it avoided the Keynesian excesses that caused additional misery and red ink in America (though it is far from fiscally conservative, notwithstanding the sophomoric analysis of the Washington Post). Nonetheless, it’s […]

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is heavily subsidized by US taxpayers, but spends a lot of time pushing an agenda against taxpayer interests. Richard Billies recently did a good job recounting the OECD’s ongoing list of big government initiatives: …The organization is fundamentally a pro-big government bureaucracy that promotes all of the social welfare […]

This is either frightening or hilarious. The people in Washington who are trying to make America more like Europe are advising the Europeans to double-down on the awful policies that have pushed the continent’s welfare states to insolvency. Here are some of the surreal details from a CNBC report. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will take […]