by Dan Mitchell | Oct 25, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs
The good thing about being a libertarian is that real-world events repeatedly demonstrate that your skepticism of big government is fully justified. Nations that adopt dirigiste policies don’t do well. States that adopt dirigiste policies don’t do well....
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 20, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Earlier this month, as part of my ongoing series about convergence and divergence, I wrote about why South Korea has grown so much faster than Brazil. My main conclusion is that nations need decent policy to prosper, and Johan Norberg shares a similar perspective in...
by Dan Mitchell | Sep 5, 2020 | Blogs, Economics, Free Market
Traditional economics, specifically convergence theory, tells us that poor nations should grow faster than rich nations. I’m more interested, however, in why convergence often doesn’t happen, or only partially happens. And I’m extremely interested in why we often...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 23, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs, Welfare and Entitlements
There are many reasons to be depressed about Italy. Bad policy is part of the problem, of course, but this chart shows that the country also is facing a demographic crisis. The blue lines show that there are now more deaths than births. The chart comes from...
by Dan Mitchell | Jul 10, 2020 | Big Government, Blogs
It doesn’t get as much attention as basket-case nations such as Venezuela, North Korea, Zimbabwe, or Cuba, but Argentina is one of the world’s worst-governed nations. It is ranked #155 out of 159 nations by the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of the World. It...
