My all-time most-viewed blog post wasn’t the parable about beer and the tax system. Nor was it the joke about California, Texas, and the Coyote. Those won the silver and bronze trophies. The gold medal belongs to the two pictures that explain how the welfare state begins and how it ends. Those images make a very serious point that […]

When I posted a video about “libertarian porn” back in 2010, readers presumably were either relieved or disappointed that there was no nudity. I may get the same reaction today, because we’re going to have a discussion – but only G-rated – about what our British friends are referring to as “poverty porn.” More specifically, that’s the term […]

There’s an old joke about two guys camping in the woods, when suddenly they see a hungry bear charging over a hill in their direction. One of the guys starts lacing up his sneakers and his friend says, “What are you doing? You can’t outrun a bear.” The other guys says, I don’t have to […]

Washington is in the middle of another debate about redistributing money. But that’s hardly newsworthy. Politics, after all, is basically a never-ending racket in which insiders buy votes and accumulate power with other people’s money. The current debate about extending unemployment benefits is remarkable, though (at least from an economic perspective), because certain politicians want to give people money on […]

I’ve shared many charts over the years, but two of the most compelling ones deal with poverty. The numbers in this chart, which are based on Census Bureau data and scholarly studies (see here, here, here, and here), show that the poverty rate was steadily falling in the United States – until the federal government decided to launch a so-called […]

The welfare state is a nightmare. Programs such as Medicaid are fiscal catastrophes. The food stamp program is riddled with waste. The EITC is easily defrauded, even sending checks to prisoners. And housing subsidies are a recipe for the worst forms of social engineering. The entire system should be tossed in the trash. But what’s […]

Obamacare was put together by people who don’t understand economics. This is probably the understatement of the year since I could be referring to many features of the bad law. The higher tax burden on saving and investment, making an anti-growth tax system even worse. The exacerbation of the third-party payer problem, which is the […]

We’re making a tiny bit of progress in the battle against the welfare state. No, policy hasn’t changed yet, but at least there’s growing recognition that maybe, just maybe, it’s not a good idea to pay people not to work. Particularly when you trap them in lives of dependency and despair and undermine progress in […]

As illustrated by this chart, economists are lousy forecasters. To be more specific, economists are no better than fortune tellers when trying to make short-run macroeconomic forecasts. Heck, if we actually knew what was going to happen over the next 12 months, we’d all be billionaires. But we can (on occasion) make sensible predictions about […]

About two years ago, I shared a map put together by a pro-statism organization that supposedly showed that welfare benefits were very miserly and not sufficiently generous to lift people out of poverty. My gut instinct was to reject the findings. As I wrote at the time: The poverty line is set considerably above a […]