I’ve been at the United Nations this week for both the 14th Session of the Committee of Experts on International Cooperation in Tax Matters as well as the Special Meeting of ECOSOC on International Cooperation in Tax Matters. As you might suspect, it would be an understatement to say this puts me in the belly […]
Because of their long-fought battle for equal access to education, it is generally assumed that black families are big fans of public schooling. That assumption, however, is beginning to show its datedness, as evidenced by the research of University of Georgia College of Education professor Cheryl Fields-Smith. In a recent interview with The 74, Dr. […]
In the fall of 2015, the Polish political arena was shaken by the overwhelming victory of the socially conservative and nationalist Law and Justice Party (PiS). The party has subsequently embarked on dismantling democracy through media control, limits on civil liberties, and paralyzing judicial independence. Poland, once an unquestionable success story in the former Eastern […]
The world’s newest country, South Sudan, is suffering one of the worst famines in history, with nearly a million South Sudanese on the verge of starvation, after having suffered through two years of civil war. South Sudan falls within the bottom quartile of countries in per capita GDP, despite having the third largest oil reserves […]
Why is Trump attacking the House Freedom Caucus? He has tweeted that “we must fight them.” My first thought: this is inevitable. Destiny is unfolding before our eyes! There is the obvious fact that the Freedom Caucus was the reason the GOP’s so-called replacement for Obamacare went down to defeat. They fought it for a […]
I shared last year a matrix to illustrate Milton Friedman’s great insight about the superior results achieved by markets compared to government. Incentives explain why markets work best. When you spend your own money on yourself (box 1), you try to maximize quality while minimizing cost. And that drives the businesses that are competing for […]
You want to know why the “freedom caucus” has balked at passing the Trump-backed Ryancare health care proposal? Because the package does not address the core problem of the existing system. They are leaning – correctly – on a brilliant insight from F.A. Hayek. Let’s think this through. What was the most fundamental problem with […]
My hope is that this article will settle this nonsense once and for all. It won’t. Fake news outlets will persist as long as they are allowed to get away with it. It’s a smear and an outright lie but it goes on often, especially recently. The Background First of all, as you undoubtedly know, […]
I was truly startled by the energy, enthusiasm, intelligence, and passion of the people who attended LibertyCon – sponsored by the European Students for Liberty – in Prague this year. I was honored to be a speaker, but especially excited to have my first exposure to a remarkable movement taking shape in Europe, one that […]
Angus Deaton, the Nobel-prize winning economist (who also sits on the advisory board of HumanProgress.org), recently reiterated his belief that on the whole the world is getting better–if not, as he accepted, everywhere or for everyone at once. Perhaps that comes as no surprise, but the idea that the world is getting better in regards to poverty is […]
The people had finally found their leader, a champion for those who had built the country with their hard work and yet now believed themselves to be silenced and ignored—left behind by the artificial currents of contemporary life. He would make their voices heard again. They didn’t think of themselves as angry—at least not without […]
As the federal debt has gone from astounding to unbelievable to incomprehensible, a new problem has emerged: The US government is actually running out of places to borrow. How Many Zeros Are in a Trillion? The $20 trillion debt is already twice the annual revenues collected by all the world’s governments combined. Counting unfunded liabilities, which […]
From Radical Revolutionaries to Privileged Bureaucrats The great German sociologist, Max Weber (1864-1920) offered an understanding of the evolution of socialist regimes in the twentieth century from revolutionary radicalism to a stagnant system of power, privilege and plunder, manned by self-interested Soviet socialist office holders. Max Weber, in his posthumously published monumental treatise, Economy and […]
Wikileaks has just published over 8,000 files they say were leaked from the CIA, explaining how the CIA developed the capacity to spy on you through your phone, your computer, and even your television. And Wikileaks’s Julian Assange claims these “Vault 7” documents are just one percent of all the CIA documents they have. The […]
The story of the private sector is that competition generates ever-more output in ways that bring ever-higher living standards to ever-greater numbers of people. By contrast, the story of the government is inefficiency and waste as interest groups figure out how to grab ever-larger amounts of unmerited goodies, often while doing less and less. Obama spent buckets of money […]