Richard J Grant

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, January 27, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . Richard J. Grant There is an obvious reason why Republicans, despite holding a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, keep appearing to lose their fiscal standoffs against the Democrats who control the White House and the Senate. In both of the post-election fiscal fights, first over the “fiscal cliff” and then the “debt ceiling” standoff, standing fast would trigger consequences that most Americans would find undesirable. The party to flinch first would be the one that is less certain of its esteem in the eyes of the electorate. On the fiscal cliff, Republicans accepted a compromise on tax rates in order to avoid an automatic increase in all income tax rates. Few doubted that such across-the-board tax-rate increases would further depress the economy, so Republicans gave the president his more-modest requested tax increases in the forlorn hope that the electorate would exhibit the ...

James M. Buchanan: Economist, Philosopher, and Teacher. Requiescat In Pace. Link to my Forbes article

Published in The Tennessean , Sunday, January 6, 2013 and at FORBES with archives . Richard J. Grant Although nature presents us with an adequate array of obstacles, many of society’s most formidable ills are self-inflicted, most potently through the ballot box. The framers of the U.S. Constitution were rightly wary of the dangers of unfettered democracy. They understood that most parts of our lives should be set apart, protected from the reach of voters. Over two centuries later, voters seem no more reliable. They can find all sorts of reasons to meddle in other people’s lives through the magic of government. They seem more able to imagine the wonderful things that governments might do than they are able to imagine the costs. Imagination is often untethered to education. Those who would wish the government more tax revenue, would also have us believe that taxes are benign in their impact on business. After all, in the past century we have had some of the highest corporate a...