Obama Unveils 2012 Campaign Slogan

With banks and non-financial companies sitting on trillions of  dollars because of the negative economic environment created in part by his policies, this new poster is both funny and troubling. However, I think this cartoon does the best job of capturing the destructive impact of big government on economic performance. Sort of makes you wonder what [...]

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IRS Commissioner Bumps into Reality, Learns Nothing and Wants to Make the Tax System Worse

This interview with the IRS Commissioner is really irritating. He wants us to believe that all the problems exist because of bad laws enacted by Congress. I certainly agree that the crowd in Washington is venal, corrupt, and duplicitous. But the IRS takes a bad situation and makes it worse, whether we’re looking at gross [...]

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Clowns of a Feather Stick Together: French Presidential Candidate Echoes Biden, Says Higher Tax Rates Are Patriotic

I rarely comment on Vice President Biden because he is not a serious person in the world of policy. The only attention he gets on this blog is jabs from the late-night talk show hosts, and I also posted the Joe Biden caption contest and this Joe Biden joke. Perhaps I would have given Biden [...]

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To Boost Obama’s Redistribution Agenda, OECD Pushes Crazy Assertion that Poverty Is Higher in the U.S. than in Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and Turkey

Supporters of individual liberty and national sovereignty have been skeptical of the United Nations, and with good reason. With the support of statists such as George Soros, the U.N. pushes for crazy ideas such as global taxation and global currency. But there’s another international bureaucracy, also funded by American tax dollars, that is even more [...]

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New Polling Data Shows How to Fight Obama’s Class Warfare

Since starting this blog, I’ve periodically shared polling data that gives me hope. Highlights include: o More than two-to-one support for personal retirement accounts. o Recognition that big government is the greatest danger to America’s future. o An increasingly negative view of the federal government. o More than eight-to-one support for less spending rather than [...]

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If Even the International Monetary Fund Acknowledges the Laffer Curve, Why Doesn’t Obama Realize that Higher Tax Rates are All Pain and No Gain?

I speculated last year that the political elite finally might be realizing that higher tax rates are not the solution to Greece’s fiscal situation. Simply stated, you can only squeeze so much blood out of a stone, and pushing tax rates higher cripples growth and drives more people into the underground economy. Well, it turns [...]

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What’s the Difference between a Libertarian, a Supply-Sider, a Keynesian, and an IMF Bureaucrat?

I realize the title of this post sounds like the beginning of a joke, along the lines of “A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar…”, but this is a serious topic. A big problem in fiscal debates is that people can’t even agree on what they mean by certain words. For [...]

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Enjoy this TSA Invasiveness Contest

I’ve expressed my disdain for the bureaucrats from the Transportation Security Administration, including stories such as: o Confiscating a plastic hammer from a mentally retarded man. o Detaining a woman for carrying breast milk. o Hassling a woman for the unexplained red flag of having sequentially numbered checks. o Demanding that a handicapped 4-year old boy walk through a [...]

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Two Amusing – but Disturbing – Cartoons about Dependency

I’ve always been partial to these dependency cartoons produced by a former Cato intern, but these two are well worth sharing. If you want to see more of Chuck Asay’s great cartoons, click here, here, here, and here. On a related theme, here’s a cartoon from Lisa Benson. The good news, as shown in this polling data, is [...]

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Has Obama Made the Economy Better or Worse?

I’ve been a big critic of Obama’s policies on taxes, spending, regulation, and intervention, so you won’t be surprised that I argued on CNBC that his policies have made the economy worse. Here are two graphs, which I posted earlier this month, that make my point. The red lines show the economy is finally – [...]

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Ten Reasons to Dislike the Federal Reserve

Nothing compares to the depth and substance of Professor George Selgin’s scholarly take-down of the Federal Reserve, but this video by a local libertarian has a very authentic feel. Julie lists 10 reasons to dislike the Fed. 1.    The Fed has too much power. 2.    The Fed has devalued the currency. 3.    The Fed hurts [...]

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I Always Suspected Greek Bureaucrats Were Useless Pieces of S**t, but even I’m Surprised to Learn that They’re Actually Collecting the Stuff

I’ve been having fun in recent months by comparing some of the foolish decisions of politicians and bureaucrats in the United States and United Kingdom. Here’s part of what I wrote in early January. In June of last year, I posted several examples of idiotic government policy from both the United States and United Kingdom [...]

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What’s the Recipe for Growth and Prosperity?

What is the best way improve economic performance and boost living standards? If you listen to politicians, they would like us to think that adopting Policy A or repealing Policy B is a magic elixir. And if that means adopting a flat tax or repealing Obamacare, I’ll certainly be happy. But this video, based on [...]

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Is Mitt Romney a Keynesian?

What is it about Mitt Romney? The United States desperately needs smaller government, lower taxes, and less intervention, yet his comments and track record on issues such as the  value-added tax, healthcare, Social Security reform, budget savings, ethanol subsidies, and the minimum wage leave a lot to be desired. We can now add something else [...]

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Obama’s Corporate Tax Refom: Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Titanic?

American companies are hindered by what is arguably the world’s most punitive corporate tax system. The federal corporate rate is 35 percent, which climbs to more than 39 percent when you add state corporate taxes. Among developed nations, only Japan is in the same ballpark, and that country is hardly a role model of economic [...]

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Based on Where the Top 1 Percent Lives, the Occupy Crowd Should Be Protesting Against Big Government

I’ve written before about how big government is enriching people in the Washington metropolitan area. This is for two reasons. First, bureaucrats are paid too much, getting twice as much compensation, on average, as people in the productive sector of the economy. Second, lobbyists, contractors, and interest groups have figured out how to get lucrative [...]

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Should the IRS Be Squandering $15 Million on P.R. Flacks to Improve its Image?

The overwhelming fiscal policy challenge for America is entitlement programs, as I explain in this set of videos. To protect America from becoming another Greece, we need personal retirement accounts for Social Security. We need vouchers for Medicare. And we need to block-grant Medicaid back to the states. Real reform can give people more security [...]

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The Higher-Education Bubble and Third-Party Payer

Taxes and spending are two of the most obvious burdens imposed by government, and I’m glad that many people are fighting against a political class that seems to have a limitless appetite for a bigger public sector. But politicians also can do great damage to an economy with mandates, regulations, and other forms of intervention. [...]

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Ways & Means Committee Republicans Achieve the Dubious Honor of Winning the First Bob Dole Award

I confess to being monotonous and repetitive when it comes to explaining that America’s fiscal problem is too much spending, and that debt and deficits are simply symptoms of that underlying problem of excessive government. But no matter how often I repeat myself, the message isn’t sinking in – even among people who should know [...]

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Why Won’t Washington Understand that Paying People to Be Unemployed Means More Unemployment?

I’ve written periodically about the perverse incentives of the unemployment insurance system. Simply stated, there will be fewer jobs if the government subsidizes joblessness, and I even showed that this is a consensus position by citing the academic writings of left-leaning economists such as Larry Summers and Paul Krugman. The San Francisco Federal Reserve also [...]

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Patriotism, Loyalty, Tax Competition, and “Tax Fugitives”

I fight to preserve tax competition, fiscal sovereignty, and financial privacy for the simple reason that politicians are less likely to impose destructive tax policy if they know that labor and capital can escape to jurisdictions with more responsible fiscal climates. My opponents in this battle are high-tax governments, statist international bureaucracies such as the [...]

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Why Libertarianism Is the Best Philosophy, as Demonstrated by a Cartoon

Every so often, I write about what makes libertarianism special and different. In the future, though, I think I’ll simply share this excellent cartoon. By the way, I actually think the cartoon is a bit unfair to conservatives. Unless I’m missing something, the right-wing position on birth control is to resist subsidies and mandates. As [...]

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A Lesson for Krugman, et al, about Canada’s Real Fiscal Restraint vs. the United Kingdom’s Faux Austerity

Demonstrating that he’s probably not a fan of Mitchell’s Golden Rule, Paul Krugman recently asserted that fiscal austerity has failed in the United Kingdom. Citing Keynesian theory and weak economics numbers, he warned about “the austerity doctrine that has dominated elite policy discussion” and says that the British government made a mistake when it decided [...]

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More Wonderfully Vicious One-Liners from the Late-Night Talk Shows

In recent weeks, I’ve shared several clever jokes making fun of noble and wonderful people such as myself (i.e., libertarians). Let’s now have some fun by mocking despicable and loathsome people (i.e., politicians). There are several good jabs at Gingrich below, but the first two Leno one-liners against Obama are very effective and funny. Jay [...]

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Sex and the Power of Economics

Even though there is a wealth of evidence for the Laffer Curve, statists and other big-government advocates routinely claim that incentives don’t matter. So I wonder how they’ll react to this new research showing that incentives have an impact on sexual choices. Here are some blurbs from The Economist. …if you are a poor African [...]

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Anti-Republican Humor (With an Important Exception)

When I first saw this picture, I thought it must have been created by a Ron Paul fan. And since Congressman Paul is the closest to my views according to the Reason political quiz, it’s easy to see why I would jump to that conclusion. But maybe the person who created this image wasn’t really [...]

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Welfare Humor that Will Get You Pissed Off

After a series of posts making fun of libertarians (here, here, here, here, and here), it’s time to aim some humor at the left. Even if it means a lame pun in the title. This poster is funny, but it also makes a serious point about whether there should be behavioral restrictions on people who [...]

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Even with a Volatile Stock Market, Personal Retirement Accounts Are Better and Safer than Social Security

Early last year, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity released this video, narrated by yours truly, making the case that the United States and other nations should shift from a tax-and-transfer entitlement scheme to a system of personal retirement accounts. Some left wingers criticized the idea, saying the big drop in the stock market in [...]

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Thanks to these Horror Stories of Stupidity and Incompetence, Prepare to Downgrade Your Opinion of Big Government

While I’m obviously not a fan of big government, I have mixed feelings about why the public sector is so blindly wasteful. Is it because politicians and bureaucrats are well-intentioned morons who accidentally do damage (as illustrated by this cartoon), or is it that they are venal vultures looking to grab as much loot as [...]

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Excellent Self-Deprecating Libertarian Humor

Readers seem to really enjoy the political humor on this site, much of which mocks big government and statist politicians. But the jokes and cartoons mocking libertarians also get good reviews, probably because advocates of small government have better senses of humor and are less insecure (how’s that for self-serving analysis?). We started this series [...]

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