I’ve previously explained that the federal government should have no role in housing and that the Department of Housing and Urban Development should be abolished. If I haven’t convinced you, then you should watch this powerful video from the folks at Reason TV. What an outrage. Politicians create a program, claiming that they will help […]

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities is a left-wing group in Washington that advocates for bigger government and higher taxes. In an effort to promote more redistribution, they recently put together a map showing how welfare benefits varied by state. We’re supposed to look at the map and conclude that welfare benefits are too […]

Sometimes during speeches, when explaining why politicians shouldn’t double tax income that is saved and invested, I ask the audience whether it would make sense to harvest apples by cutting the branches off of trees filled with ripe fruit. In every audience (at least when I’m not talking to politicians), people instinctively understand that this […]

The Census Bureau has just released the 2010 poverty numbers, and the new data is terrible. There are now a record number of poor people in America, and the poverty rate has jumped to 15.1 percent. But I don’t really blame President Obama for these grim numbers. Yes, he’s increased the burden of government, which […]

I took part in a thirty-minute online Skype debate for PBS on income inequality, and they boiled it down to the 4:44 youtube video embedded below. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I said economic growth was the key. I don’t want to re-slice the pie. I want to make it bigger. I […]

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. […]

As the national debate shifts away from the immediate issues surrounding the debt ceiling, members of Congress should focus now on the fundamental purpose of government in a free society. Current excesses in federal spending have resulted largely due to the continued expansion of government into areas outside its original charter. One way in which […]

I’m often amazed at how the political class concocts new rights that can only be fulfilled by trampling on genuine freedoms. In a previous post, I mocked Finland for deciding that broadband access was a human right (which presumably means Finns were being oppressed before Al Gore invented the Internet). Another post sarcastically noted that […]

I’ve beaten up on Newt Gingrich for his views on global warming and his attack on the Ryan budget plan, but I’m completely on his side in the faux controversy about whether it is racist to call Barack Obama the “food stamp president.” This story from ABC News should worry everybody, regardless of whether the […]

I posted a joke about this last year, but this video makes the point much more effectively. When you tax and redistribute income or grades, you penalize those who achieve and work hard. Kudos to the college kids who put this together. The volume sometimes is inadequate, but the overall message comes through loud and […]