Key questions for the new year.

I periodically try to explain that there’s a big difference between being pro-market and pro-business. Simply stated, policy makers shouldn’t try to penalize businesses with taxes,mandates, and regulations. But neither should politicians seek to subsidize businesses. That’s why I’m against bailouts, subsidies, and other distortions that provide special favors for politically connected companies. I have nothing against companies earning money, to be sure, but […]

If you like to go along to get along, I suggest you don’t become a libertarian. At least not if you follow politics or work in Washington. Otherwise, you’re doomed to a life of endlessly pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Here are three examples. 1. When almost every Republican and Democrat argued […]

There’s a saying in the sports world about how last-minute comebacks are examples of “snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.” I don’t like that phrase because it reminds me of the painful way my beloved Georgia Bulldogs were defeated a couple of weeks ago by Auburn. But I also don’t like the saying because […]

The sequester was a victory for advocates of small government and a major defeat for the Obama administration. It was also a defeat for the special interest bottom feeders who leech off the American taxpayer. But they’re not going down quietly: The defense aerospace industry gave 60 percent of its donations to Republicans during the […]

We have another candidate for our “Republican Hall of Shame.” The governor of Ohio, John Kasich, is embracing Obamacare. Moreover, not only does he want bad healthcare policy, but he’s using third-world tactics and making morally reprehensible arguments. The Wall Street Journal savages Kasich in a stinging editorial. Here’s a key excerpt that explains the […]

I sometimes make fun of Republicans for being the “Stupid Party,” but I get genuinely agitated when they’re the “Statist Party.” You can forgive someone for not being intelligent, after all, but it’s much harder to look the other way when they deliberately and knowingly do the wrong thing. And that seems to be a […]

I damned Obama with faint praise last year by asserting that he would never be able to make America as statist as France. My main point was to explain that the French people, notwithstanding their many positive attributes, seem hopelessly statist. At least that’s how they vote, even though they supposedly support spending cuts according […]

In recent months, people have asked me why I’m acting all giddy and optimistic. Am I hooked on cocaine? Have I fallen in love? Did I inherit several million dollars? These questions started after I said the fiscal cliff was a smaller loss than I expected. Then people wondered what was going on when I […]

Notwithstanding hysterical rhetoric from the White House, the bureaucracies, and the various pro-spending lobbies in Washington, the sequester does not mean “vicious” or “draconian” spending cuts. I wish that was the case. All it does is restrain spending so that it grows by $2.4 trillion over the next 10 years rather than $2.5 trillion. We […]