by Dan Mitchell | Apr 7, 2026 | Blogs, Economics
I created the 8th Theorem of Government because it’s important to distinguish between people who want to help the poor and people who want to punish the rich. The former group has good motives while the latter group has ignoble motivations....
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 1, 2026 | Blogs, Economics
President Lyndon Johnson (in)famously declared a War on Poverty back in the 1960s and the net result was a bloated welfare state and more government dependency. Most depressing, poverty had been declining before LBJ expanded the...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 31, 2026 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Here’s the latest data looking at how poverty has dramatically declined since the advent of capitalism, courtesy of Our World in Data at Oxford University. I wanted to begin today’s column with this uplifting data because we’re going to be focusing on how to help the...
by Dan Mitchell | Jan 9, 2026 | Blogs, Economics
In 2016, here’s some of what I wrote about the economic outlook in Illinois. And I shared the same observation when writing about California in 2018. There’s a somewhat famous quote from Adam Smith (“there is a great deal of ruin in a nation“)...
by Dan Mitchell | Nov 21, 2025 | Blogs, Economics, Taxation
Honest leftists (the “Okunites“) generally acknowledge that laissez-faire policies deliver more growth, but they nonetheless favor high taxes and redistribution because they argue that social equality matters a lot. However, according to this chart, there’s...
