Free market capitalism is premised on the idea that open competition between competitors leads to better products and lower prices. Why? Because customers will flock to the cheaper and/or better products at the expense of the more expensive and/or worse products. That leaves the economic loser with two options: improve or go [...]

The whole point of democracy is that politicians want to get reelected. A politician who wants to get reelected is a politician who can be controlled by the voters. He is responsive. He cares what his constituents think. He wants to take care of them. On the other hand, a [...]

Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania, the fifth most senior Republican in the Senate, is now the eight most senior Democrat. This wasn’t done for committee assignment reasons: he was previously the Ranking Republican in the Judiciary Committee, where now he loses to Patrick Leahy, and was previously second on the GOP appropriations seniority list whereas [...]

I haven’t traveled extensively internationally, so I’m not sure if this problem goes beyond the borders of the United States. But within the United States I can unequivocally state a key fact that makes the lives of millions of Americans needlessly more complicated than it otherwise should be: it is a heck of a [...]

I haven’t thought through this idea enough to have decided whether its genius, idiocy, or somewhere in between. But the idea of letters of marque to stop piracy… Ron Paul is consistently the most creative politician out there.
His ideas are far from mainstream, no doubt. And some are fiascos in the making. But [...]

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just this past week announced the details of the Obama Administration’s Department of Defense budget. For once, it isn’t the size of the budget that has made a lot of waves, but instead the details of the budget. Gates and Obama want to radically restructure the military. [...]

This is the bread of affliction, which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt.
For those of you who aren’t Jewish, the above phrase will be said at millions of Passover Seder’s tonight, as it has on the first night of Passover for thousands of years. It refers to Matzah - an [...]

I remember watching the news, it must have been around the year 2000, and seeing several economist-pundits discussing the “new economy”. The general agreement on the round-table that day, with only one dissenter, was that the United States had entered into a post-cycle economy due to the technological boom of the 1990s and that [...]

Rest easy, America. We know that the auto industry is in turmoil, the economy is leaking both jobs and money, the health care system is broken, our educational system is in need of overhaul, and our fiscal future is in doubt. But at least Congress is acting in a bipartisan way to fix [...]

In an internet Q&A with President Obama last week, he was asked about the beneficial effects on the economy and/or fiscal health of the nation if marijuana were legalized and taxed. I’ve seen this argument before, so I thought I might run through some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see if there is any merit to [...]