Which country has the biggest interest in stopping the expansion of the oil and gas industry in Europe and North America? Answer: the Russian Federation is highly dependent — to the tune of several hundred billion dollars — on the export of these commodities,...

If you were a librarian, would you put President Obama's recently delivered State of the Union address in the fiction or nonfiction section? All presidents puff their accomplishments and gloss over their failures, but no previous president has been so blatant in just...

People are a bit more free and prosperous as a result of the work of Gary Becker, John Blundell, Leonard Liggio, Gordon Tullock and Henry Manne, all of whom passed away during the last eight months. Henry Manne, dean emeritus of the George Mason University Law School,...

Cayman is prosperous, in part, because of a great global lie, which causes many big rich nations to pursue bad economic policies. The global lie is that the developed countries have too little government, rather than too much. That lie causes countries to tax...

Martin Anderson, well regarded economist and an adviser to three presidents, passed away yesterday. Anderson will go down in history as a significant contributor to both the theory and practice of public policy, as a result of his many influential books and the...

What is the greatest obstacle confronting the new congressional Republican majority in enacting good policy? It may not be President Obama, because there is an even more formidable force in Washington that crushes good policy: the permanent bureaucracy. The permanent...

How many hurricanes do you think will hit the East Coast of the United States in 2015? Will the Arctic ice sheet disappear next year? How fast will the U.S. economy grow? What will the level of the Dow Jones stock index be at the end of 2015? Which team will win the...

As we go into this Christmas week, you should count your blessings that you live in 2014. Would you prefer to live as the French King Louis XIV did (1643-1715), or as you do today? The average low-income American, who makes $25,000 per year, lives in a home that has...

Why do very successful nations often adopt policies that lead to their undoing? After a revolution or major reform, some countries allow a high degree of economic freedom, establish the rule of law, protect private property rights and establish low tax rates with...

Ukraine will likely go bankrupt within the next few months. This past Friday, it was reported that the country has less than $10 billion in foreign-currency reserves. My sources (who have been spot on the Russian/Ukrainian situation over the last couple of years) tell...

Would you make an effort to find ways to reduce your tax burden if your tax rate was suddenly raised 50 percent? The higher one's income, the more incentive a person has to find ways to minimize his tax burden — which is why very high tax rates on the rich always fail...

Whom do you work for? Such a simple question should not require a government agency to give an answer. However, the Obama administration, in its never-ending quest for power over individuals and businesses, has decided that it — rather than you or your employer —...

The only surprising thing about Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber's revelations that the legislation was based on a series of lies and voter stupidity was that Mr. Gruber was so stupid to think no one would see the videos of him saying so. The good news is that,...

Russian President Vladimir Putin's clear goal is to re-establish as much of the Russian Empire (1721-1917) as he can. At its greatest extent, the Russian Empire included the territories of the old Soviet Union, most of Eastern Europe, Finland and Alaska (up to 1866)....

The basic function of government is the protection of person and property, and the United States is losing ground both in absolute terms and relative to other countries on this basic measure of liberty. Last month, the Economic Freedom of the World annual index for...

After last week's ruling wherein a federal court failed to permanently bar the Internal Revenue Service from targeting conservative groups, there can be no doubt that liberty and the IRS are incompatible. The IRS continues to seize bank accounts of individuals and...

What is the maximum income-tax rate that anyone should be expected to pay? Some questions are never settled, in part because people often ignore the theoretical and empirical evidence, and history that can help answer the question. The question of what an optimum...

If you pay people not to work, what do you think they will do? In a new staff paper published by the New York Federal Reserve Bank titled "Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession," the researchers found "that most of the persistent increase in...