With several European countries looking to bolster their budgets by taxing the wealthy, Sven R. Larson considers the track record of wealth taxes on the Continent. As he writes in The European Conservative, such taxes are a “politically desperate lifeline for a fiscally desperate government” and more likely than not to have a detrimental effect on public coffers.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
