Shopping with Amazon Prime has made my life better. But has Amazon improved the U.S. economy? Several forms of government help may account for Amazon’s success. Ensuring that success constitutes progress becomes challenging when government and business are entangled. Online retailing has clearly benefitted residents of America’s small towns and rural areas. Our shopping options […]

    Civil asset forfeiture involves the government taking assets allegedly used in or the proceeds of criminal activity. The practice has long angered libertarians and produced many injustices. A reform bill has been introduced in the state legislature this session. First a little history. Civil asset forfeiture in the U.S. dates to the early […]

“Who has seen the wind?” Certain costs in economics are similarly invisible and probably impact our lives even more than the wind.

Refunding sales taxes to retailers as an incentive may be good policy for state and local governments. But it should be policy only if we make a fully informed decision.

  Did you win the recent Mega Millions or Powerball $400 million jackpots? If not, perhaps you are lucky, since big jackpots often make people miserable. The “lottery curse” and related research findings suggest that perhaps we should rethink our economic priorities. We all know what we would buy with some extra money, so a […]

    We frequently wish for a happy and prosperous New Year. As an economist, I know more about prosperity than happiness. Because economic freedom is closely related to prosperity, 2017 closed with some good news for Alabama. The Economic Freedom of North America report, published by Canada’s Fraser Institute, measures the freedom of markets […]

    Republicans’ and Democrats’ attitudes toward higher education are seemingly diverging. Increasingly critical Republican attitudes will likely in time have policy consequences. An annual Pew Center survey found in 2015 that 54 percent of Republicans thought that higher education’s impact on the country was positive, versus 37 percent negative. This year these numbers flipped […]

Robots and artificial intelligence will automate routine physical jobs. Never again will so many people work on assembly lines for so long.

The corporate income tax today is like a con game, one riddled with exemptions for privileged firms. Reform is long overdue.

    The current debate in Congress over tax reform highlights a favorite argument of economists: that we should eliminate loopholes, like the deductions for mortgage interest or state and local taxes, and use the savings to lower tax rates. The argument illustrates both core economic principles and the limitations of a purely economic analysis. […]

Economic freedom in the U.S. rose from 7.81 to 7.94 in 2015, the latest year for which data is available, moving us from 13th freeist nation to the 11th.

Providing expensive autism therapy for families is a worthy effort. Here's how to help without mandates that threaten health care viability.