“That government is best which governs not at all,”
Said Henry David Thoreau,
But what did he know?
_______________________________________________
“Liberty:  not the daughter but the mother of order,”
Declared Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,
And then he passed on.
_______________________________________________
“When the government is too intrusive, people lose their spirit,”
Noted Lao-tzu,
As I would, too.
_______________________________________________
“Great men are almost always bad men,”
Declared Lord Acton
―some wisdom to act on.
_______________________________________________
“Let [...]

In a November 3 article, the Wall Street Journal reports that corporate cash holdings have reached extraordinary levels:
Stung by the financial crisis, companies are holding more cash — and a greater percentage of assets in cash — than at any time in the past 40 years.
In the second quarter, the 500 largest nonfinancial U.S. firms, [...]

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 personal [...]

Although democracy now comes closer than anything else to serving as a world religion, it has never lacked critics. For millennia those critics, such as Aristotle, had large followings among political thinkers and practicing politicians. Even as late as 1787, when a group of prominent men met in Philadelphia to compose the U.S. Constitution, democracy [...]

Peter Klein’s post about the bizarro world in which the SEC prefers not to define insider trading too carefully, lest that definition cramp the government’s prosecutorial style, reminds me of the similarly vague definition of price fixing for purposes of enforcing the antitrust laws. The best acccount I have seen of this matter comes from R. W. [...]

Since the early 1980s, I have been lecturing on the growth of government to a wide variety of audiences. In academic seminars and workshops, professors typically ask questions about my explanatory framework, my evidence, alternative explanations, possible counterexamples, and so forth. But when I speak to a friendly lay audience, the first question is typically [...]

Because I despise politics in general, and the two major parties in this country in particular, I go through life constantly bemused by all the weight that people put on partisan political loyalties and on adherence to the normative demarcations the parties promote. Henry Adams observed that “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has [...]

Despite all of the smiley faces that journalists for the mainstream news media continue to paste on their reports about recent economic developments, the official unemployment rate now verges on 10 percent, and various economic indicators signal a discouraging prospect for the near-term future. Republican partisans, willing to grasp and exploit any passing news that seems to discredit the ruling Democrats, [...]

You need a strong stomach to endure the messages disseminated by the mainstream news media, especially by its premier outlets, such as the New York Times. Of course, at this late date, nobody expects anything like political nonpartisanship or sound economic analysis  from the Times, yet one continues to hope that the writers will not [...]

To the great astonishment of all of us who believed the U.S. government incapable of making an intelligent foreign and defense policy decision, the Obama administration has decided to terminate the U.S. plan to place anti-missile missiles in Poland and related radars in the Czech Republic. The plan had mightily provoked the Russian government, which not unreasonably [...]