Topic: columns
Will: How long will US Congress remain a bystander regarding war?
There is no reason to think that North Korea’s regime will relinquish weapons it deems essential to its single priority: survival.
Rahn: The end of government ‘Monopoly money’
The energy and the intelligence are on the side of the entrepreneurs, not on the side of the government regulators. Ultimately, government central banks and financial agencies are going to lose this battle.
It is time to scrap the Jones Act
Congress is thinking about giving Puerto Rico a new five-year exemption from the law. That is the least it should do.
Mitchell: How not to improve government schools
The simple reality is that giving more money to government schools is a foolish gesture.
Will: Republicans’ tax wager is worth the gamble
Economics is a science of incentives, and like all sciences it is never “settled.”
Mitchell: The best reasons to support tax havens
The late Mancur Olsen was a very accomplished academic economist who described the unfortunate tendency of vote-seeking governments to behave like “stationary bandits,” seeking to extract the maximum amount of money from taxpayers.
Morici: Treating US Congress as a harbinger of recession
These days, politics poses more threats to the economy than the machinations of the bond market as measured by the slope of the yield curve or any other metric.
Responding to the crisis in Honduras
A week after voting in a bitterly contested presidential election, Hondurans still do not know who their next president will be.
Rahn: Choosing political allegiance over the economic reality
Why do members of the media (e.g., The New York Times editorial page) give more credence to those who failed in their past predictions than those who got it right? Is it political bias or ignorance of history that causes the reality disconnect?
Mitchell: If Chile is such a failure, why is it so prosperous?
Honest analysis requires a look at the overall record, and all data sources show that Chile’s economic performance is far superior to its peers.
Will: College basketball season begins under odiferous clouds
There is no way gracefully – without unseemly accommodations – to graft onto universities an enormously lucrative entertainment industry.
Morici: Economic nationalism is a losing strategy
Instead of rallying American allies to confront China’s mercantilism through joint action, Mr. Trump has bullied Mexico, South Korea and Canada, pulled America out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and derailed free trade talks with the EU.
Rahn: The myth of growing income inequality
The current GDP measures were largely developed in the 1930s. But they do not accurately measure relative well-being in the new technological world.
Will: A nod, and noddingoff, to another year of American hilarity
Tryptophan, an amino acid in turkey, is unjustly blamed for what mere gluttony does, making Americans comatose every fourth Thursday in November. But before nodding off, give thanks for another year of American hilarity...
Keillor: A trip to New York
It’s good to be old. Every day is an adventure.
Mitchell: Here’s how millionaire leftists can continue paying their ‘fair share’ of taxes
The Treasury Department has a website that they can use to voluntarily send extra money to Washington. It’s called “gifts to reduce the public debt,” and people like George Soros can have their accountants and lawyers calculate the value of any tax cut and then use this form to send that amount of money to D.C.
Rahn: Claiming entitlement to their own facts
What is particularly sad and disturbing is that so many in the media also suffer from cognitive dissonance, in that they have an inability to recognize anything that President Trump or the congressional Republicans do correctly (and they really do some things correctly).
US must confront China to achieve 4 percent growth
Either China commits to opening up its markets to U.S. goods and investments on a fully reciprocal basis and balancing bilateral trade over three years, or the United States should unilaterally impose a system of import licenses.
Keillor: A man walks into a bar in Oregon
The gentle people shall prevail. Count on it.
Will: The radiating mischief of protectionism
What a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive ourselves into believing that corporate welfare can be seemly.
Morici: Robots and artificial intelligence will not be the end of work
AI will not replace doctors, but it will permit them to treat more patients more effectively and at lower costs. And somehow, I do not think people are quite ready to leave life and death decisions to an iPhone app.
Rahn: Hiding scandalous behavior behind noble causes
Part of the solution is to shrink the size of the rogue institutions while requiring greater transparency and accountability.
Keillor: The old ‘obit man’ looks around
They each had a clear vocation and made a mark and I miss them and hate to delete them from my phone. I grieve for each of them and I also tell myself to buckle down. Pay attention. Do your job. Don’t kill time. Cherish your elders as they pass.
Morici: The race for electric vehicle dominance
If carmakers cannot get mundane high-tech gadgets to work flawlessly, how can anyone reasonably expect them to provide assured safety for passengers in driverless vehicles?
Mitchell: A tragic, continuing story of fiscal decay
Billions of dollars of wealth have already left New Jersey because of bad tax policy. Yet politicians in Trenton blindly want to make the state even less attractive.
Rahn: Don’t underestimate the sizzle of tax cuts
Congress should not let itself be bound by the CBO projections of the tax changes, given that the office is still using models that fail to adequately account for changes in behavior.
Morici: Quantitative easing is alive and well
When the next recession arrives and the Fed wants to boost bank lending, it will not be able to accomplish much by lowering the rate it pays banks and asset funds on their deposits at the Fed–the financial crisis taught us that banks worry about getting repaid a lot more than their cost of lendable funds.
Mitchell: Prosperity in a post-Brexit world
The bottom line is that the UK has plenty of negotiating power to get a good outcome.
Rebuilding Puerto Rico
The first order of business must be getting people out of harm's way and providing life's essentials. But there also is a need for a sound, long-term rebuilding and economic plan.
Bloomberg: Business leaders can solve global problems
Business leaders have a long tradition of supporting global engagement, through both their work and philanthropy. Bringing chief executives around a table with heads of state carries benefits for both groups.
Rahn: Prudence must guide disaster responses and adaptations
Life is all about accessing the probabilities of the risks and costs and benefits of alternative courses of action.
Will: A hilarious and elementary lesson on the burdens of progressivism
Rosenfeld’s novel is a glimpse of how arduous life is for progressives, bowed as they are beneath the crushing weight of every choice’s immense social significance.
Morici: Forget triple-A, US bonds deserve a rating of ‘F’
The upcoming showdowns over Medicaid, other entitlements and cuts to other federal spending as part of efforts to raise the debt ceiling and to define targets for spending in the 2018 fiscal year appropriation bills will reveal the Republican majority’s stomach for spending reform and courage to lead the country out of the fiscal wilderness.
Will Congress be stirred from its slumber?
What Obama did was popular and unconstitutional. The latter attribute probably does not interest Obama’s successor, but the former attribute evidently does.
Trump is threatening war with North Korea. But what kind?
When Trump threatened North Korea with “fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was he threatening to cross the nuclear weapons threshold?
Mitchell: Macron’s reforms sure to boost job growth in France
France has all sorts of rules that “protect” employees, but the net effect is that workers suffer because these laws discourage entrepreneurs from creating jobs.
Rahn: The tax cut the US cannot do without
Without cutting our noncompetitive corporate tax rate, businesses will continue to move to the rest of the world, leaving fewer jobs for Americans and less to tax.
Will: Yale offers a tutorial in social descent
The socialization of children, which prepares them to enter the wider world, has been shifted from parents to primary and secondary schools, and now to higher education...
Will: Laws that subvert the rule of law
When John Adams wrote into Massachusetts’ Constitution a commitment to a “government of laws and not of men,” he probably assumed that the rule of law meant the rule of laws, no matter how many laws there might be. He could not have imagined the modern proliferation and complexity of laws, or how subversive this is of the rule of law.
Rahn: The price-level dilemma
In sum, monetary policy as we have known it is broken and is unlikely to be put back together again in a satisfactory way.
NATO troops can’t fight if they’re stuck at customs
Nobody wants war, but projecting a credible response is a vital part of deterrence.
Mitchell: New Zealand’s road map for sweeping pro-market reform
New Zealand's reforms are - or at least should be - a road map for Greece to follow.
Ignatius: North Korea, on the brink
North Korea’s rhetoric blasts the United States. But in a deeper way, it’s China that’s being put in an intolerable position by Pyongyang.
Rahn: The insurance compulsion
A reason to severely limit government’s role in insuring against individual risk is that history shows free markets can provide insurance for most things more efficiently and without compulsion.
The real victims of class-warfare taxation
Harsh taxes on yachts backfire because the people being targeted have considerable ability to escape the tax by simply choosing to buy yachts, staff yachts, and sail yachts where taxes aren’t so onerous.
Promises won’t kill the combustion engine
Governments are rightly hesitant to force something on consumers that doesn’t really work for them –which is why countries that plan to ban combustion engines in new cars haven’t actually legislated on it yet.
Rahn: Crony capitalism against the real thing
The opponents of capitalism have succeeded in clouding the minds of many, by failing to distinguish between free-market capitalism and crony capitalism.
Krauthammer: What should be done for little Charlie Gard
The irreducible truth is that these conundrums have no definitive answer. We thus necessarily fall back on family, or to put it more sentimentally, on love.
Rahn: Corruption and prosperity
What is the single most important determinate as to whether a country is rich or poor? It is not the level of government spending, taxation, regulation or monetary stability – even though those factors are very important. It is the rule of law, whereby the rules are known and fair, equally applied to all, and where corruption is not tolerated.
Will: Amtrak helps government ride off the rails
In 1906, Leonor Loree, an accomplished railroad executive, examined the dilapidated Kansas City Southern Railroad that he had been hired to rehabilitate.
Rahn: Looking for loot in other people’s pockets
Well brought-up individuals are taught not to take things from other people’s pockets: “Thou shall not steal.” There are those who never learned the lesson — criminals, and many in the global political class.
