by Dan Mitchell | Feb 12, 2026 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
At the end of last year, I celebrated two years of libertarian progress in Argentina. Now, thanks to strong results for President Milei’s libertarian party in the October mid-term elections, I’ll hopefully have a column at the end of this year to...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 9, 2016 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Regulations
Frederic Bastiat, the great French economist (yes, such creatures used to exist) from the 1800s, famously observed that a good economist always considers both the “seen” and “unseen” consequences of any action. A sloppy economist looks at the recipients of government...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 5, 2011 | Blogs, Economics
Labor Day is a good opportunity to consider whether unions help or hurt ordinary workers in America. The answer is yes and no, depending on circumstances, but that’s actually the wrong question. The real issue, at least from a public policy perspective, is whether...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 2, 2011 | Blogs, Economics, Minimum Wage
My Cato colleague, Mark Calabria, recently explained how the minimum wage destroys jobs, and I’ve written on several occasions why government-mandated wages can create unemployment by making it unprofitable to hire people with low work skills and/or poor work...
by Dan Mitchell | Dec 26, 2010 | Big Government, Blogs, Free Market, Taxation
The world is a laboratory and different nations are public policy experiments. Not surprisingly, the evidence from these experiments is that nations with more freedom tend to grow faster and enjoy more prosperity. Nations with big governments, by contrast, are more...
