“Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason,” wrote the Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington. The news that Tony Blair has been helping Emanuel Macron thwart Britain’s attempts to escape the clutches of the EU fits Harington’s epigram as never before. For if indeed Britain becomes trapped […]

The Trump administration and some Congressional Republicans want to expand the H1B and H2B immigration programs. Under these programs – H1B for skilled labor, H2B for unskilled — immigrants can work only for their sponsoring employers and must leave the United States if that employment ends. They cannot participate in the free U.S. labor market […]

Japan has had a rough 30 years of no growth with soaring public debt and zero interest rates. In the same period, China’s economy has taken off at record-breaking speed – as we now learn, with considerable cheating on intellectual property protections and the like. On closer examination, the two phenomena are closely connected, with […]

This week, we learned that a hedge fund and the credit default swap (CDS) market had pushed a regional telecom company, Windstream Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq:WIN) into bankruptcy. The toxic CDS product caused havoc in 2008, and regulators have been their usual ineffectual selves in failing to grasp it since. There is no legal way to […]

Senator Marco Rubio (R.-FL.) is not a favorite of this column – he is much too fond of open-borders projects and his child tax credit was a waste of government money. But his latest idea, a tax on stock buybacks, looks well designed to remove most of this plague on U.S. corporate finance and the […]

This column has contended for several years, based on empirical data observations from several countries, that low interest rates worldwide were killing productivity growth. A University of Chicago paper finally provides some academic back-up for this contention and suggests a mechanism through which it takes place. There are other mechanisms also, and I would suggest […]

The OECD recently published a paper on taxation and economic development that claimed that the propensity of poor countries to tax less than rich ones is a contributor to their poverty. Thus, by raising taxes to Western levels, they could develop their economies. This view is not surprising from an organization of international bureaucrats, but […]

It appears increasingly likely that the British people will be forced into a “People’s Vote” re-running the Brexit referendum of 2016. For those of us around during the Cold War the term “People’s Vote” has a familiar ring, similar to the “People’s Republics” and People’s Democracies” of Communist tyranny. This therefore begs the question: is […]

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio claimed last week that there was plenty of money for his pet projects, but it was “in the wrong hands.” In response, the Wall Street Journal, supposedly the voice of capitalism, gave a turgid list of rich New Yorkers’ charitable donations while blasting the inefficiencies of de Blasio’s administration. […]