The U.S. Treasury Department has just released the final statement for its 2020 fiscal year. I knew going in it was going to be bad because of the impact of COVID-19. Having now seen it, all I can say is that how bad it is, is a thing to behold. It is the most...
Read More »

Treasury department’s new graphic helps explain deficit.

Fifteen years after the September 11th terrorist attacks, we can see that the horrific events unfortunately fit the pattern of other major tragedies. As Independent Institute scholar Robert Higgs has documented so ably in his work (see, for example, here, here, here, and here), the Leviathan State exploits a crisis in order to expand...
Read More »

“Why do we have a government at all?” Occasionally, I have the chance to ask students this question. After examining the unintended consequences of government policies and discussing the economics of politics (i.e. public choice economics in the tradition of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock), the rosy picture of government from their high school civics...
Read More »

Big business leaders—heretofore merry shills for Obama’s disastrous policies—have finally woken up to the fact that such policies are bad even for those with friends in the White House. The Chairman of the Business Roundtable, a group whose support helped further ObamaCare, Cap-and-Trade, and any and all Keynesian “stimulus” spending, now warns: By reaching...
Read More »

In a recent commentary titled “Diagnostics and Therapeutics in Political Economy,” I endeavored to show that an analytical understanding of past growth in the government’s size, scope, and power does not permit us to prescribe effective means of stopping or slowing this growth, particularly any simple “silver bullet” remedy, and I specifically disclaimed any...
Read More »