During the dark ages, nations like China were relatively advanced while Europeans were living in squalid huts. But that began to change several hundred years ago. Europe experienced the enlightenment and industrial revolution while the empires of Asia languished. What accounts for this dramatic shift? I’m not going to pretend there’s a single explanation, but […]

If we want to avoid the kind of Greek-style fiscal collapse implied by this BIS and OECD data, we need some external force to limit the tendency of politicians to over-tax and over-spend. That’s why I’m a big advocate of tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy (read Pierre Bessard and Allister Heath to understand […]

In previous posts, I put together tutorials on the Laffer Curve, tax competition, and the economics of government spending. Today, we’re going to look at the issue of tax reform. The focus will be the flat tax, but this analysis applies equally to national sales tax systems such as the Fair Tax. There are three […]

My friends at Americans for Tax Reform have received a bunch of attention for a new report entitled “Win Olympic Gold, Pay the IRS.” In this clever document, they reveal that athletes could face a tax bill – to those wonderful folks at the IRS – of nearly $9,000 thanks to America’s unfriendly worldwide tax […]

Considering that every economic theory agrees that living standards and worker compensation are closely correlated with the amount of capital in an economy (this picture is a compelling illustration of the relationship), one would think that politicians – particularly those who say they want to improve wages – would be very anxious not to create […]