Since January 2017, France requires all cigarette packs to be sold in plain packaging — they all come in the same green-ish colour, only a neutral font lets the consumer identify the different brands. The government’s anti-tobacco fanaticism costs the taxpayer a fortune.
“F**k it, we’ll do it live!” Bill O’Reilly’s iconic moment as a peeved host of “Inside Edition,” mixed with his more recent habit of dominating the ratings at Fox News, seem unusual in Europe. Here, TV, especially shows about politics and culture, attempts to maintain a facade of earnestness. Apart from the UK’s “Prime Minister’s Questions,” the […]
On the 13th of April, the Dáil (the Irish parliament) decided to get rid of the 2014-introduced domestic charging schemes for water consumption. The legislation had forced many Irish citizens to pay individual water charges, as opposed to water being a universal good provided solely through the government, free of charge. As the first bills arrived in January 2015, […]
Risen eyebrows, perplexed faces: some visitors at The Society Club on Cheshire Street in Shoreditch, London looked slightly confused at the sight of the city’s very first Nanny Store on April 20. For one day only, the student group Students for Liberty and the Consumer Choice Center took on themselves to ridicule the creeping interventionist nature of what is often […]
On Thursday I had the chance to be a guest on The Glenn Beck Program to talk about the French Elections. We addressed questions regarding the persona of Marine Le Pen, the chances of Macron winning and similarities with what is happening in the United States. You can check out the audio down below:
I first encountered the idea of opportunity costs when I read Frédéric Bastiat’s “That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen”(1), an absolute must read for all students for economics or law. Bastiat brilliantly dismantles the idea of what he calls “The Broken Window Fallacy”(2): the idea that the destruction of a window […]
I had the pleasure to talk to Stephen Kent from the Young Voices podcast about the rise of the far-right in Europe and the results of the first-round vote in the French presidential election. One of the topics was the “European populists aren’t conservative, they’re faux-right” op-ed I co-authored with Young Voices executive director Casey […]
My friend and fellow SFL’er Rob Duffy launched his own podcast Conversations with Rob, on which I had the pleasure to appear. Please like the Facebook page here and follow the Twitter account here!
This article was first published by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). When asked how expensive a pack of cigarettes should be in order to reduce the general consumption of tobacco, French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron responded, “I believe that €10 is an adequate price. I am ready for that.”
This article was written together with Young Voices executive director Casey Given. The original was published in the Washington Examiner. At first glance, conservatives might view the rise of Europe’s far-right like a refreshing counterbalance to years of socialism run amok. In truth, these reactionary parties endorse eerily similar economic policies as the left-wing they […]
Bill Wirtz 