We received this text from our reader, who asked to remain anonymous. The important question he asks is - how is taxpayer money spent in such disasters? Watching a TV report this week about the landslide of rocks and earth on the Asenovgrad - Smolyan road, I was definitely provoked by the statement ...

When the French economist Thomas Piketty published his massive paper arguing that the steady rise in economic inequality was inevitable under capitalism, his thesis and its supposed and empirical basis quickly gained support among leftists, who echoed Piketty’s call for greater redistributive taxation. Other economists spent a lot of time …

Against the backdrop of debates about environmental protection, based on economic logic, we will present our view on the most effective way to utilize and protect nature in Bulgaria. Economic Calculation and Efficiency As Ludwig von Mises pointed out in his article Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth back in 1920 …

In public choice theory (which became particularly popular after the Nobel Prize for one of its founders, James Buchanan), there is talk of the so-called "rational ignorance". It is a situation in which the expenditure of resources (time, attention, effort, etc.) required for a person to become informed on a given issue exceeds the potential benefit of learning ...

The rhetoric of leftist movements is often peppered with arguments about inequality. Their strongest populist theses are based precisely on social phenomena, presented as “social inequalities” that should be remedied through the power of the state apparatus and regulatory coercion. The reason for using this type of populism is that it allows for easy …

Edward Hess In early January, four people in the UK died[i] as a result of using something that looked like ecstasy (MDMA). Before we understand why the war on drugs contributed to, rather than prevented, the deaths of these four people, let’s look at ecstasy itself. MDMA is …

Several years after the start of the financial crisis and the subsequent launch of the quantitative easing program, politicians and central bankers reported a positive change in the values of some economic indicators, reading this as a signal of an improvement in the general situation of the economy and the labor market. In order to achieve some of the desired …

About 10 days ago, it became clear to the general public that the government would issue new external debt worth 8.1 billion euros (16 billion leva) in the form of bonds within the period 2015-2017. This news polarized commentators and the public into two camps: defenders of the debt (mainly "right-wing" analysts and ...

Art Carden Are the motives of those who defend the “free market” the same as those who support “corporations”? Libertarian economists find this question frustrating because our enthusiasm for free markets is often confused with enthusiasm for particular industries or corporate interests. But just because something …

At the end of last year, GERB announced its intention to initiate a program for free renovation of EPK blocks with more than 36 apartments. Today, a few months later, despite the obvious problems and the lack of quality planning, the program is a fact and is already in its initial stage. For a large part of the citizens, …