Search

Search results

1. Former chief of staff’s new book is bravely contrarian

   I responded to the stifling heat that descended on Central Canada this week by descending to the relative cool of my basement, tuning in the World Cup Round of 16, and, because soccer isn’t a game that requires undivided attention, ...

2. The United States calls the kettle black

   Canadians owe Donald Trump a debt of gratitude for repeatedly referring to our average 270 per cent tariffs on dairy products coming into—or trying to come into—this country. For many Canadians, that’s probably the first they’ve heard of ...

3. Has Canada’s last marijuana arrest already taken place?

   One of my favourite math puzzles—actually, I’m not much of a mathematician, so it’s one of the few math puzzles I know—is the surprise test problem, which I learn from Wikipedia is also referred to, much more melodramatically, as the ...

4. Cut the growth of growth commissions

   I hardly ever disagree with Jack Mintz, former president of the C. D. Howe Institute, former director of the University of Calgary School of Public Policy, and for the past decade or two the dean of Canadian policy economists. But I do ...

5. Economics—the melancholy science

   Economics is known as “the dismal science,” though for reasons that are usually misunderstood. Having practiced it for most of my adult life, I don’t think of it as dismal—that would be a sorry way to spend a career. I do think of it as ...

6. The end of Trump-whispering

   I wrote in January about how economists, apart from warning about the consequences, don’t have an awful lot to say about how best to fight a trade war. Adam Smith himself wrote that such wars were a situation in which policy be left to ...

7. Congress resists crony diplomacy—good!

   Even an economist with libertarian tendencies, which I am, thinks there are times when it’s actually reassuring to have a “deep state,” though it would be nice if it weren’t quite so swampy. The Wall Street Journal reports that some ...

8. Do sports leagues really own their scores? Say it ain’t so, commissioners!

   When I was a kid playing Little League baseball, I was a devoted follower of the televised Big League game of the week, which in Montreal came to our TV antenna from WCBS Burlington, Vermont. At the time, CBS owned the New York Yankees ...

9. My ‘Aha! Moment’ on minimum wages… and more

   If firms don’t collude, and there are lots of them around, wages will rise until they’re equal to worker productivity. ...

10. If Shakespeare were writing today—‘let's kill all the (tax) lawyers’

    There was a lovely press release this week from Aaron Wudrick of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation warning us all that if we wanted to read the Income Tax Act before next week’s April 30 filing deadline, we’d better get started. And we’d ...