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1. Drugs, murder, cellphones and economics

   At the Fraser Institute’s economics seminars for journalists, one of the messages we instructors try to get across is that economics isn’t mainly about interest rates, the stock market, exchange rates or other money matters, which is what ...

2. Notes gone underground—who has all the missing $1,000s?

   At last week’s Fraser Institute seminar for journalists, where 25 scribes from across the country got together for two-and-a-half days instruction in economics from three economics profs, including myself, we were talking during one ...

3. For higher productivity—don’t drive a cab, run a charity

   Statistics Canada published some interesting productivity updates this week. Mind you, what it called them doesn’t make them sound very interesting: “Labour productivity and related measures by business sector industry and by non ...

4. Subtracting value through higher tariffs

   China exports essentially fully constructed iPhones. ...

5. Admiral Norman and the cost of military contracts

   It would be interesting—maybe the auditor general will have a look—to know just how much the two-plus years of the investigation and prosecution of Admiral Mark Norman (above, middle) cost the federal government. The charges against him, ...

6. Golf is great—but don’t even think about subsidizing it

   When I play 18 holes, the person who benefits is me. ...

7. Quick summary of the zillionaires’ externality

   In my National Post column this week I wrote about a new research paper called “ Taxing Top Incomes in a World of Ideas ” by Charles I. Jones at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. It’s a reasonably straightforward, if ...

8. One good thing about the carbon tax

   Introducing a new tax is an unconventional way to kick off an election campaign. Perhaps understanding that, the federal government declines to call its new carbon tax a tax. It calls it a fuel charge instead. Or more precisely, a “ fuel ...

9. “STiK” is Ottawa’s acronym for “social transfer in kind."

   How can we be sticking it to the middle class when just about every announcement from the current federal government, whatever the subject, begins with a depressingly Orwellian proclamation about how the government is exclusively ...

10. If millennials have no money, how can house prices be high?

    As I was driving to the federal budget lockup in Ottawa Tuesday morning, CBC’s The Current was running a discussion of the problems millennials are having “trying to get a foot on the property ladder.” The news hook was that, judging by ...