I’ve periodically written about the overall cost of regulation, and I’ve also highlighted the onerous costs of proposals such as the Dodd-Frank bailout bill. This blurb from the IFC Review may give readers a sense of the regulatory onslaught facing financial institutions. Banks and other financial services firms had to deal with 60 regulatory changes each working […]

Being the world’s self-appointed defender of so-called tax havens has led to some rather bizarre episodes. The bureaucrats at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development threatened to have me thrown in a Mexican jail for the horrible crime of standing in the public lobby of a hotel and giving advice to low-tax jurisdictions. On […]

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 […]

It was only a few decades ago that there was no such thing as money-laundering laws. Instead, the focus of law enforcement was on the underlying criminal behavior (such as robbery) that generated ill-gotten gains. In recent decades, however, politicians around the world have passed hundreds of laws, created hundreds of agencies, and spawned several international […]

The Washington Post has an interesting report about the huge amount of money that Fairfax County spends to go after gambling. The story cites critics who ask “why law enforcement spends valuable time and money on combating sports gambling. The answer is obvious – and explicit in the story: “…police in Virginia are allowed to […]