I sometimes assert that the greatest enemies of freedom in Washington are mortgage payments and tuition bills. When people give me a blank stare, I say that I’m joking, but I use the opportunity to explain that the desire for easy wealth (and the lifestyle it enables) lures many Republicans to become lobbyists and to […]

The internal revenue code is nightmarishly complex, as illustrated by this video. Americans spend more than 7 billion hours each year in a hopeless effort to figure out how to deal with more than 7 million words of tax law and regulation. Why does this mess exist? The simple answer is that politicians benefit from […]

I’ve always rejected coercive redistribution, particularly when imposed by the federal government. But some types of redistribution are worse than others, and when big business and big government get in bed together, ordinary people are the ones who get screwed. This is why Obama’s supposed “move to the center” is a bunch of nonsense. Tim […]

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner has a great piece looking at the utterly indefensible panoply of ethanol subsidies and handouts that screw consumers and taxpayers in order to line the pockets of the politically powerful. Unfortunately, several senior GOP lawmakers have unseemly ties to the lobbyists for the industry. So this is a test, […]

Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner is an expert on corruption and sleaze inside the beltway, and his column this morning is a perfect example. He shows how corrupt insiders in Alaska use something known as the “Rent-an-Eskimo” scam to pull in hundreds of millions of tax dollars from no-bid federal contracts. These insiders, meanwhile, […]