A plan to ditch the income tax, make taxation fairer and aid economic growth all at the same time.

Why have some financial firms weathered the crisis better than others? The answers contain lessons for how to regulate the industry.

The Origin of Species is a better guide to our economy than The Wealth of Nations.

Democratic institutions aren't sufficient in themselves to keep the wealthy few from concentrating political power.

As longtime readers know, I’m not particularly skeptical about climate science, suitably wrapped with the inevitable cautions and caveats about complex natural systems whose history and dynamics are imperfectly understood, but I am deeply skeptical about climate policy.  Green climate policies tend to be otherworldly utopian fantasies like the global carbon treaty or heavy handed, […]

In American states, past voting trends and the number of electoral college votes up for grabs shape presidential candidates’ campaigns, as Gerald Seib describes in the WSJ: The important thing to remember about a presidential election is that it isn’t a contest to win the popular vote nationwide. It is a contest to win in […]

Sheikh Dr. Ahmad Al-Tayeb, the head of one of the most important centers of learning in the Islamic world, wrote a remarkably tolerant article in the Egyptian government daily newspaper Al-Ahram back in June. Translated excerpts of the article recently appeared at MEMRI: The Koran, which Many Muslims know by heart, affirms that had God […]

In an interesting article on the federal law code, the Wall Street Journal discusses the weakening of criminal intent standards: For centuries, a bedrock principle of criminal law has held that people must know they are doing something wrong before they can be found guilty. The concept is known as mens rea, Latin for a […]

The riots that scarred much of London last month came as a shock to the British public. As often happens with social upheavals of this type, the chattering class has spent the past few weeks discussing the cause of the riots, and has finally settled on a simple explanation: single mothers. The New York Times […]

Why hasn’t the biggest economic crisis in two generations rekindled the political left?American leftists are not alone in asking this question; the failure of the latest recession to fuel anti-capitalist or at least anti-corporate rage in most of the developed world has European social democrats scratching their heads.  The 2008 financial crisis was, from a […]