Here’s a cheerful story I saw linked on Drudge, which shows that sometimes rich people are not guilt-ridden statists and instead stand shoulder to shoulder with ordinary people to fight bad government policy. In Australia, the leftist government wants to impose a class-warfare tax on the mining industry, but the scheme is backfiring as opponents […]

In an amusing coincidence, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and I were both in Latin America this week offering fiscal policy advice. But it won’t surprise you to know that Mrs. Clinton’s suggestions are radically different than the advice I provided. She spoke in Ecaudor and, according to an AFP report, said it was time […]

Big Government bailouts haven’t just been directed toward businesses and Wall Street, they’ve also been deployed to prop up Big Governments.  Having taken “stimulus” money while fully aware that it was a one-time windfall, politicians in many state capitals went ahead and spent as if it was a dedicated revenue stream, according to the State […]

I gave a speech in Hungary about two weeks ago and now the government has announced a big step in the direction of better fiscal policy. According to Reuters, “Hungary’s new government plans to introduce a flat personal income tax of 16 percent from 2011, as well as a 15 percent cut in public sector […]

This story from Business Week warmed my heart. Switzerland’s cantons are competing to create better tax policy, and this is attracting companies seeking to escape the kleptocracies elsewhere in Europe. This shows the value of tax competition (imagine how bad taxes would be in Germany and France if politicians in those nations didn’t have to […]

Okay, the title of this post is an absurd exaggeration, but I am not optimistic about the future of the United Kingdom. Government spending has exploded over the last ten-plus years (the largest expansion in the burden of government spending among developed nations), and this unsurprisingly has led to punitive class-warfare policies. I saved this […]

The New York Times has an article describing widespread tax evasion in Greece, along with an implication that the country’s fiscal crisis is largely the result of unpaid taxes and could be mostly solved if taxpayers were more obedient to the state. This is an grossly inaccurate. A quick look at the budget numbers reveals […]

Price fixing is illegal in the private sector, but unfortunately there are no rules against schemes by politicians to create oligopolies in order to prop up bad government policy. The latest example comes from the bureaucrats at the International Monetary Fund, who are conspiring with national governments to impose higher taxes and regulations on the banking sector. […]

Being an American citizen is an honor in many ways, but it is a huge millstone around the neck for highly successful investors and entrepreneurs because of an oppressive and complex tax system. This is particularly true for those based in and/or competing in global markets. Indeed, because the tax system (and regulatory system) is […]

Nicholas Sarkozy spoke at Columbia University in New York on Monday and, as he has done before, demonstrated that everyone who calls themselves a conservative is not a free marketer.   The French President pressed for an expansion of global financial bureaucracies and blasted the right of individual countries to be fiscally sovereign.  The following Associated […]