by Dan Mitchell | Oct 23, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
Yesterday’s column was about a new report from Olivier De Schutter, a bureaucrat at the United Nations who has the grandiose title of being the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Mr. De Schutter claims that the welfare state (he calls it “social...
by Dan Mitchell | Oct 22, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
In 2018, I shared a visual that I referred to as the western world’s “most depressing chart.” It showed how the welfare state exploded in size after World War II and is now an enormous fiscal burden. This has been bad news for taxpayers, of course, but...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 26, 2025 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
The newest edition of Economic Freedom of the World has been released by the Fraser Institute and I will continue my tradition (2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, etc) of putting a spotlight on major developments. We’ll...
by Dan Mitchell | Aug 13, 2025 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
A few years ago, advocates of a “basic income” seemed to have a lot of momentum on their side. Nations were holding referendums, presidential candidates were embracing the concept, and even some libertarians were saying nice things about the idea. Being a curmudgeon...
by Dan Mitchell | Jun 21, 2025 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
In Part VII of this series about Javier Milei’s libertarian policies in Argentina, I celebrated a 10-percentage point reduction in the nation’s poverty rate. That’s amazing progress in a short amount of time. As shown in this updated chart,...
