The phrase “equal pay for equal work” is in play again, with an intended meaning we all know. The idea is that government should force (really force, this time) private employers to boost the pay of women to match the rate of men in the same positions. Almost every state had laws that specifically limited […]
On August 1, the “Movement for Black Lives” (an umbrella organization for about 50 groups associated with the Black Lives Matter movement) released a list of demands going into the general election campaign. The New York Times reports, The list of six platform demands is aimed at furthering their goals as the presidential campaign heads into the homestretch. […]
At the Democratic Convention, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker lamented that American women do not earn “equal pay for equal work.” A Hillary Clinton administration, they promised, would right this wrong. The latest U.S. Department of Labor data show that women working full-time make 81 percent of full-time men’s wages. But this figure is both […]
Who was the biggest mass murderer in the history of the world? Most people probably assume that the answer is Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust. Others might guess Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who may indeed have managed to kill even more innocent people than Hitler did, many of them as part of a terror […]
The Office of Management and Budget has released new data on the amount of time Americans spend complying with the federal tax code. Tax Foundation summarizes the data here. Individuals and businesses spend 8.9 billion hours a year on federal tax paperwork, which is equivalent to 4.3 million people working full-time and year-round on this unproductive […]
As Americans celebrated their freedom this Fourth of July, headlines graphically proved how diminished that liberty is. Hannah Cohen, 18 years old and severely disabled from a brain tumor, sued the TSA and local cops for beating her bloody. Hannah’s “crime”? She had neither understood nor complied with their orders when trying to board a […]
I don’t mind being polemical on occasion, but I generally don’t accuse my opponents of being “socialists.” American leftists generally focus on redistribution and regulatory intervention, and socialism technically means that the government directly owns, operates, and controls various sectors of the economy (think, for example, of the difference between Obamacare and the U.K.’s system, where doctors are public employees […]
Businesses in Venezuela have a problem. Actually, almost everyone in Venezuela has a great many problems. Starvation, for example. Shortages of basic goods. Dysfunctional and understaffed hospitals, which lack medications. A corrupt and increasingly militarised government determined to protect the incumbent president, Nicolás Maduro, at all costs. Shortages, inflation, and protectionism cripple the economy.But businesses, especially […]
I do not speak Spanish fluently. Indeed, I am often at a loss for the right words, not to mention a proper conjugation of the verbs, and I frequently fail to understand what people say to me. Yet all in all, I am astonished that, living in a part of Mexico where few people speak […]
A predictable response to the horrific massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, in which a gunman murdered 49 people and injured 53 others, mostly Latino, is to restrict gun ownership to police only. But this response ignores the real relationship gay and ethnic minority populations have had with police. It’s a history of violence, […]
It’s said that sadness isn’t the opposite of happiness — boredom is. A fully schooled generation has created a generation of bored adult children.With this in mind, is it any surprise that children, adolescents, and young adults today are so unhappy? Is it any surprise that so many turn to extending their schooled lives into structured activities as […]
Critics frequently accuse markets and capitalism of making life worse for the poor. This refrain is certainly common in the halls of left-leaning academia as well as in broader intellectual circles. But like so many other criticisms of capitalism, this one ignores the very real, and very available, facts of history. Nothing has done more […]
Socialist rhetoric changes very little over time. It turns out to be rather easy to juxtapose refutations from decades ago against the blather you hear on the news today. As with economics generally, the fallacies of collectivist statism must be refuted in every generation. So here we have video of Milton Friedman dealing with the […]
Bills filed in the North Carolina General Assembly would provide student loan debt relief to “public interest” attorneys and to K-12 teachers. Both proposals are ill-advised. Rather than erase debt for those in politically connected groups, lawmakers should work to address the root causes of skyrocketing college costs, which are borne by all North Carolina […]
David Henderson does a very nice job summarizing why stripping workers of the right to offer X as part of an employment contract makes most workers worse off, even if the intention of the government officials who do the stripping is to help workers — and, indeed, even if a Nobel laureate economist misses this […]