It’s clear that many big government policies are creating winners and losers in America. The story has been the same for decades. Government makes friends with a company or an industry, blocks out the competition with regulation, and in some cases gives the company subsidies. Such cronyism is bad for innovators and for consumers. But … Continue reading 8 Big-Government Policies That Hurt the Poor
Category: Economy
If you were to believe the mainstream media, you may think President Trump just proposed slashing federal spending and decreasing the size of government. Bless your heart. Here are the actual numbers: Trump's proposed budget plan: FY2018 outlays: $4.094 trillion FY2027 outlays: $5.708 trillion That's a 39.4 percent increase in federal spending over the next … Continue reading ‘Trump cuts spending’ is Fake News. He’s increasing it worse than Obama.
Eighty years ago, on May 27, 1935, the U.S. Supreme Court said no to economic fascism in America. The trend toward bigger and ever-more intrusive government, unfortunately, was not stopped, but the case nonetheless was a significant event that at that time prevented the institutionalizing of a Mussolini-type corporativist system in America. In a unanimous … Continue reading When the Supreme Court Stopped FDR’s Economic Fascism
In his now-classic work The Myth of the Rational Voter, Bryan Caplan identifies four systematic biases about economics held by the average citizen: make-work bias (an inclination to overestimate the disadvantages of temporary job destruction due to productivity increases), anti-market bias (a tendency to overlook the benefits of the market as a coordination mechanism), pessimistic … Continue reading Why immigration prohibitionists always destroy their own economies
The tax system is bad news for professional sports, with plenty of anecdotal evidence showing that athletes (and even fans) get pillaged by government. Now we have some comprehensive academic research to augment the anecdotes. Playing Field Impact The Wall Street Journal opined today on a new study about the impact of marginal tax rates … Continue reading Your Team Would Win More in a Low-Tax State
An Australian millionaire and real estate mogul has advice for millennials struggling to purchase a home: stop buying avocado toast. Tim Gurner, a luxury property developer in Melbourne responsible for over $3.8bn in projects, is facing heat for comments he made on 60 Minutes in Australia, implying that young people can’t afford to buy property … Continue reading Millionaire to Millennials: If You Want to Own a House, Stop Buying $19 Avocado Toast and $4 Coffee
One of the trickiest set of issues for defenders of free enterprise is environmental concerns, especially large-scale ones like climate change. What makes more sophisticated environmentalist arguments so challenging and so interesting is that they often use ideas and terms that are frequently used to describe economic systems. For example, both natural and social systems … Continue reading Why Environmentalism Flunks Basic Economics
What word best describes the actions of government? Would it be greed? How about thuggery? Or cronyism? Writing for Reason, Eric Boehm has a story showing that “all of the above” may be the right answer. But I Am an Engineer At first it seems like a story about government greed. When Mats Järlström’s wife … Continue reading Exposing the Occupational Licensing Scam
As Venezuela descends into a nightmare of starvation and violence, the long-standing debate over the feasibility of socialism takes on new relevance. Years of explicitly socialist policies from the Chavez and Maduro regimes have taken their toll, as nationalization and a variety of other attempts to abolish or subvert market processes have destroyed what was … Continue reading Venezuela’s nightmare is where all redistributionist economies lead
Forbes recently ran an interesting article that analyzed college degree programs and underemployment. The article was based on a survey released by PayScale, which collected data from nearly one million workers between March 2014 and March 2016. Here are the 12 majors that reported the highest rates of underemployment (a situation in which someone is … Continue reading College Majors that Report the Highest Underemployment
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