An age of loose money not only destroys savings; it corrodes character.

You might suppose that financial innovation had done enough damage. But bankers, investors and philanthropists believe it can help the world’s poor

In 2008, enrollment in government health care programs grew to 87.4 million Americans--about 29% of the total. At the same time, employer-based health insurance weakened; those gaining coverage from the workplace fell from 59.3% in 2007 to 58.5%.

The game of finding someone to pin the blame on for the US housing market collapse has gone on long enough. Are the bankers responsible? The analysts who didn’t see it coming? The McMansion mums who bought homes that they couldn’t afford? No. I did it. I led people down the road to financial collapse – and I did it for the dental insurance.

Inequality in economic resources is a natural but not altogether attractive feature of a free society. As health care becomes an ever larger share of the economy, we will have no choice but to struggle with the questions of how far we should allow such inequality to extend and what restrictions on our liberty we should endure in the name of fairness.

A study shows that people who abruptly and intentionally abandon their mortgages often have high credit scores, in stark contrast with most financially distressed borrowers.

About 80 percent of the world's people live in poor countries that are as eager to get over oil as we are—they, too, want to escape the economic clutches of autocrats who rule 10 percent of the people but control 80 percent of the easily accessible oil. The poor, however, have made clear that they won't be spending what money they have curbing carbon, though collectively they emit more greenhouse gas than we do and their... More

A persistent headache is a symptom, but the underlying cause can be anything from a migraine to a brain tumor. Good medicine means identifying and treating the cause as well as the symptom. The same is true in health care reform.

For years now, many businesses and individuals in the United States have been relying on the power of government, rather than competition in the marketplace, to increase their wealth. This is politicization of the economy. It made the financial crisis much worse, and the trend is accelerating.

If you were going to come up with a list of organizations whose failures had done the most damage to the American economy in recent years, you’d probably have to start with the Wall Street firms and regulatory agencies that brought us the financial crisis. But I would suggest that the list should also include a less obvious nominee: public universities.

What did this drug company do to merit a $2.3 billion record-breaking claim by the federal government? You might think it knowingly sold a dangerous drug without government permission or a drug that went on to cause hundreds of needless deaths--but no.

While the deficits caused by the fiscal stimulus package will end in 2011 and will help to sustain a fragile recovery in 2010, the deficits projected for the longer term are a threat to our economic future. The starting point for controlling those future deficits is for Congress to abandon the administration's health-care plan—a plan that will cost more than $1 trillion.

In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, I was taught to believe individual pursuits are selfish and sacrificing for the collective good is noble. Those who left Russia found a different set of values in America.

The developed world, formerly the champion of global economic integration, has become its principal skeptic. The result is regulatory reform measures that, if unchecked, will foster a disintegration of the global economy and re-raise the very barriers to cross-border trade and investment that the world has spent the past 60 years dismantling.

“It is a paradoxical truth,’’ he once told the Economic Club of New York, “that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.’’ What he had in mind, he said, was “an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes.’’

The spread of new technologies has helped expand economies, improve quality of life, and extend health. About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa -- still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate -- a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.

By demanding we all pay more to fund their agendas in these harsh economic times, foodie snobs and lefty social critics may as well tell us to eat artisanal cake.