This is a video by my friend Dan Mitchell from the Cato Institute and the Centre for Freedom and Prosperity. While it may be primarily about the USA the concepts hold in Ireland. For instance, there are people in the OPW who are given a house on-site as part of their job and yet they still receive a travel allowance! It would be laughable if it wasn’t real. Dan spells out the downsides and you can’t easily dispute the numbers – if we were to do a similar analysis in Ireland would we find similar results?
What is the optimum size of Government?
Art Laffer is perhaps best remembered for his famous curve, some people believe it doesn’t exist (in application), others swear by it. This video looks at some of the statistics which support the argument that Government spending inhibits an economy once it goes beyond a certain point. This will be a difficult video to accept from an Irish perspective as we are constantly calling upon the state for our solutions and that requires greater state spending. Enjoy.
Murray Rothbard: ‘Money & Government’
This is a video of a Murray Rothbard lecture from 1984, he was a believer in the freedom of the production of money and a fairly extreme figure in the anarcho-capitalism camp, while his ideas have never gained widespread acceptance, it is worth listening to his views as a means to understanding the standpoint he comes from.