“Name the person and I will find the crime” is a statement attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s head of the Soviet secret police. There are more than 4,000 federal felonies on the books of the U.S. government, not counting all of the felonies created by regulatory...

Why does Virginia import oranges from Florida rather than grow its own? Why does the U.S. import almost all of its coffee and cocoa beans from countries in tropical climates rather than grow its own? Why does the U.S. import most of its primary aluminum rather than...

Fuzzy and fact-free thinking are too kind as definitions for much of what has passed as public policy analysis this past week. The discussions regarding the Parkland school shooting, the Russian political investigation and the immigration debate illustrate the...

Those who serve in the military know they will be held accountable when they are irresponsible or reckless because the lives of their fellow warriors are at stake. In contrast, there is often little accountability in much of non-military government civil service,...

Should one democracy have the right to impose its tax laws on another? With which countries, if any, should the U.S. government share your tax and other financial information? In recent years, some of the most contentious disputes among friendly countries have...

This past week, the “dean of the Venezuelan resistance,” Enrique Aristeguieta Gramcko, was arrested for publishing a video accusing the Maduro government of leading a “narco-tyranny.” There is a normal human tendency to try to shut down opposition when the facts are...

Do you think you live in a free country? How do you define “free”? To help answer these questions, the new “Human Freedom Index” (HFI) has just been released. The report is published by the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute and the Liberales Institut at the...

How rapidly will the U.S. economy grow in 2018? How about the world economy? There is a growing consensus that the world economy might grow a little more than 3.5 percent and the U.S. economy a little less than that, which would be a great improvement over recent...

Many people in poor places try to migrate to richer places — and so it has always been. But some poor places become rich places and immigration flows change as a result. There are many examples of “rathole” countries changing policies and becoming rich, and relatively...

Are you aware that the White House, congressional offices and most major media employ “fact checkers”? Given the amount of misinformation these organizations spew, a reasonable conclusion is that the fact checkers are often biased, ignorant, or ignored. Mr. Trump...

On Nov. 26, Honduras held a presidential election, and current President Juan Orlando Hernandez has just been certified a winner after three weeks of street protests, led by the opposition who challenged the election results and made assertions of some voter fraud....

The U.S. government once again proved that it does foolish and destructive things by trying to impose a tax that actually loses money. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) demanded information from a San Francisco bitcoin exchange about who was buying and selling...

After two centuries of government monopoly money, private monies are re-emerging and will likely come to dominate ultimately. Back in 1976, Nobel Laureate F.A. Hayek published his little classic, “Denationalization of Money.” In essence, Hayek argued that money is no...

Why is it that those who have been right in the past are often ignored, while great attention is paid to those who have been wrong? Many “politically correct” forecasters’ words are accepted as gospel by the media despite dismal records. New York Times economic...

If your income remains constant but the prices of many things you buy decline, you are richer. There are many articles and books asserting that the inflation-adjusted incomes for the middle- and lower-income groups in the U.S. and some of the other developed countries...

The folks in Washington have a knack for almost always asking the wrong question, and then coming up with an answer that makes things worse. The current debate about tax reform is a prime example. Many Democratic critics, some Republican critics (mainly from the...

On Nov. 4, a conference was held in London to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, which occurred in October 1917. Rather than learn from the untold human misery which stemmed from that event, many of those who participated were celebrating...

There are a few actions one can take that have no downside, only an upside. Economists teach students, “There is no free lunch,” meaning an action that might be beneficial to some may well be harmful to others. An example would be an increase in the minimum wage,...