by Dan Mitchell | Apr 14, 2019 | Blogs, Economics, Socialism
What’s socialism? Is it the centrally planned economies of Cuba and North Korea? Or the kleptocracies of Zimbabwe and Venezuela? How about the interventionist welfare states of Greece, Italy, and France? Or the redistribution-oriented Nordic nations? Since socialism...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 10, 2019 | Blogs, Economics
I was in Bratislava earlier today as part of the Free Market Road Show, where I spoke about how European nations are in trouble because of excessive spending and aging populations. But I’m not going to write about my presentation because Peter Gonda of the...
by Dan Mitchell | Apr 8, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs
I listed the collapse of Venezuela’s socialist dictatorship as one of my “hopes” for 2018. That didn’t happen, so I included the same hope in my list for 2019. But will it happen? David Asman seems very confident in this clip from a recent interview. I was a bit less...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 30, 2019 | Blogs, Economics, Socialism
Redistribution has a corrosive impact on both ends. Recipients are harmed because they get trapped in dependency, and workers are harmed because taxes discourage productive behavior. Yet young people seem susceptible to this ideology, even when they are among the main...
by Dan Mitchell | Mar 26, 2019 | Big Government, Blogs
I’ve written about how totalitarian ideologies such as communism and Nazism have a lot in common. Both subordinate the individual to the state and both give the state power over the economy. And both slaughter millions of people. My buddy from grad school, Matt Kibbe,...