I realize it’s wrong, but I can’t help cheering for France’s socialist president. Francois Hollande seems determined to raise every tax, expand every program, and augment every bit of red tape that afflicts the French economy. I fully expect this to end poorly, but at the risk of admitting that I’m chauvinistically concerned first and […]

I don’t like coercive redistribution. But I really hate redistribution from ordinary people to rich and powerful vested interests, and I even developed an “ethical bleeding heart” rule to express my disdain for this approach. Especially since programs that redistribute from the poor to the rich almost always involve corruption – often involving morally bankrupt […]

Ayn Rand’s famous novel, Atlas Shrugged, tells the story of what happens when society’s most productive people go on strike because they don’t want to subsidize the looters and moochers. I won’t give away the plot, but one interesting twist in the story is when government officials realize that they need some people to produce. […]

I wrote a celebratory post last November about the dramatic difference between Americans and Europeans. There truly is American exceptionalism in that Europeans are much more likely to think it is government’s responsibility to provide the basics of life. Another poll in 2010 showed Americans, by a 20-percentage point margin, want smaller government and lower […]

I wrote yesterday that the United Kingdom is doomed because there isn’t a political party with the vision or courage to restrain the welfare state. At various points, I’ve also expressed pessimism about the future of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, and even the United States. Simply stated, almost all western nations suffer from the […]

It’s not often that I read something by Paul Krugman and think, “Good point, I hope he’s correct.” After all, I had to correct Krugman’s inaccurate analysis of Estonia, and also point out the errors in what he wrote about the United Kingdom. And I also noted mistakes he made when writing about Canada and […]

In a recent post about Brian Ross and the despicable behavior of ABC News, I included examples of what I categorized as deliberate and accidental media bias. Here’s a good (or perhaps I should say bad) example of accidental bias, demonstrating how statist premises get incorporated into news reports. Here’s how the Associated Press began […]

In their never-ending efforts to buy votes with other people’s money (see the first cartoon in this post), politicians have been expanding the welfare state and creating more dependency. This is bad for the overall economy because it means a larger burden of government spending and it’s bad for poor people because it undermines their […]

I’m not a big fan of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. This Paris-based international bureaucracy doesn’t get as much attention as the United Nations or International Monetary Fund, but it’s probably does more damage to freedom and prosperity if measured on a per-dollar-spent basis. For instance: The OECD, in an effort to promote […]

The Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” ad is a disturbing sign. It suggests that political strategists, pollsters, and campaign advisers must think that the people living off government are getting to the point where they can out-vote the people paying for government. If that’s true, America is doomed to become another Greece – which would […]