STANFORD ― A successful society needs effective, affordable government to perform its necessary functions well, and that includes sufficient revenue to fund those functions. But a government that grows too large, centralized, bureaucratic, and expensive substantially impairs the private economy by eroding individual initiative and responsibility; crowding out private investment, consumption, and charity; and damaging incentives with high tax rates. It also risks crowding out necessary government

I love the Internet. The best Christmas present I got last year was a preview of a forthcoming book by a banker and historian in Boston. He sent me electronically his Ph.D. thesis, a piece of masterly detective work on how ideas travel over time and space, become adopted successfully in a different place, and then come back to where they started.Dr. Frederic Grant Jr.’s forthcoming book uncovered how that the U.S. bank deposit insurance system has its root in ideas borrowed from Canton of the 19

WASHINGTON ― Chuck Hagel means it when he describes himself as an “Eisenhower Republican.” He kept a bust of President Dwight Eisenhower in his Senate office for a dozen years, and has a portrait of Ike on the wall of his current office at Georgetown University. But the most compelling evidence of Hagel’s fascination is that he purchased three-dozen copies of an Eisenhower biography and gave copies to President Obama, Vice President Biden and then-Defense Secretary Bob Gates, according to the bo

TEL AVIV ― Few foresaw the surprising setback suffered by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, his Likud party, and the right in general in Israel’s recent general election. It is an outcome that will have important ramifications for Israel’s domestic politics and foreign policy alike, particularly its Middle Eastern diplomacy.Although the final vote tally awaits (soldiers’ votes have not yet been fully counted), the basic result is known. Given the current stalemate between the right and left, a

Once again during his presidential term, Lee Myung-bak has used the presidential pardon power, and once again during his presidential term the pardon power has been misused. Although the Blue House asserts such uses have been in strict accordance with law or in the pursuit of the national interest, the truth is that the use of this power to pardon family members, close confidants, or high-ranking chaebol members disregards both the spirit of the power and the original intent behind the power. Ev

In Korea, the specter called “guilt by association” is rampant. Recently, a member of the presidential transition committee resigned from his post. As usual, newspapers immediately jumped to all sorts of conclusions, assuming that he must have had some fatal flaws in his career which did not pass the government’s background check. The reporters conjectured that a possible reason for his abrupt resignation was because his wife’s family is ridiculously wealthy. Some other ungrounded guesses includ