Communal sharing didn’t work with the Pilgrims.

Markets work better than command and control.

America’s free-fall on the list of freest economies.

Since I’m a public finance economist, I realize I’m supposed to focus on big-picture issues such as tax reform and entitlement reform. And I do beat those issues to death, so I obviously care about controlling the size and power of government. But I like to think I’m also a decent human being. And this is why I […]

Two years ago, I shared a video about the Environmental Protection Agency’s brutal and thuggish tactics against an Idaho family. That story had a very happy ending because the Supreme Court struck a blow for property rights and unanimously ruled against the EPA (too bad that similarly sound analysis was absent when the Justices decided the Kelo case). […]

If you look at measures (such as the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World index) of what makes a nation competitive and prosperous, you’ll find some obvious variables such as fiscal policy, trade openness, regulatory burden, and monetary policy. But in addition to those policy levers, you’ll find that it’s equally important that a nation does a good job […]

The genius of capitalism is that there is a link between effort and reward. In a genuine market economy (as opposed to cronyism), people can only make themselves rich by working harder and smarter to satisfy the needs and wants of others. The blunder of statism is that the link between effort and reward is […]

I’m getting sick of the debt downgrade issue, so let’s shift to another topic. The title to this post may seem like a joke, but Europe’s bizarre courts have decided to trample the property rights of landlords by ruling that tenants have a “right” to satellite TV and therefore cannot be barred from installing dishes. […]

Two recent stories are sure to get your blood boiling if you support private property rights. The first regards a decision by the Supreme Court not to hear a New York eminent domain case, which saw Columbia University first game the system to have property falsely labeled as “blighted,” which it was then free to […]

There’s an odd debate in the blogosphere. As happens every Thanksgiving, libertarians and conservatives take joy in pointing out that there was mass starvation and suffering during the early years of the Plymouth Colony because of a socialist economic model. Here’s what John Stossel recently wrote. Long before the failure of modern socialism, the earliest […]