The United Nations may be useful as a forum for world leaders, but it is not a productive place to develop policy. The international bureaucracy compulsively supports statist initiatives that would reduce individual liberty and expand the burden of government. Global taxation with no democratic accountability or oversight. A “right” to taxpayer-financed birth control. An […]
read more...As a taxpayer, I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies. They consume a lot of money, pay themselves extravagant (and tax-free!) salaries, and generally promote statist policies. The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is a prime example. Originally created for benign purposes such as gathering statistics, it now is a bloated bureaucracy […]
read more...I have a love-hate attitude toward international bureaucracies. I’m mostly negative about organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, and OECD. In part this is because they are a very expensive burden on taxpayers, but also because they generally push for bad policy. It’s reprehensible, for instance, that the OECD has allied itself with […]
read more...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 […]
read more...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 […]
read more...I’m not a big fan of the United Nations and I’m not a supporter of gun control, so you can imagine how agitated I get when two bad things are combined together. And that’s exactly what’s happening with a new anti-gun treaty being concocted by the United Nations. John Bolton, a former U.S. Ambassador to […]
read more...I realize it’s a bold assertion, but the $100 million that American taxpayers send to Paris every year to subsidize the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is – on a per-dollar basis – the most destructively wasteful part in the federal budget. This video will give you some evidence. But the video also is […]
read more...I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This Paris-based international bureaucracy doesn’t get as much attention as the United Nations or International Monetary Fund, but it’s probably does more damage to freedom and prosperity if measured on a per-dollar-spent basis. For instance: The OECD, in an effort to promote […]
read more...For the most part, international summits like the recently concluded G-20 meeting in Mexico are pointless – but expensive – publicity stunts for incumbent politicians. They pose for photo-ops, have boring meeting, and draft up empty communiques, always at some posh location so that everybody – from bureaucrat flunkies to servile reporters – can have […]
read more...I’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies, mostly because they always seem to promote bad policy such as higher tax rates. The International Monetary Fund is urging higher tax rates and pushing for nations to replace flat tax systems with so-called progressive taxation. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has embraced Obama’s class-warfare […]
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