Taxpayers respond to higher rates by changing behaviour, working less at the margin, restructuring how income is received, deferring or shifting assets, sometimes relocating, and that behavioural response means the revenue gain from a higher rate is consistently smaller than static arithmetic predic

Rent control reliably shrinks the supply of rental housing over time, benefiting the tenants who hold a controlled lease at the direct expense of everyone trying to enter the rental market afterward. The visible winners are politically loud. The invisible losers, future renters facing a smaller, mor

Renewable generation does put genuine downward pressure on wholesale electricity prices, but wholesale prices are only one component of what households actually pay, and the total cost of the transition, transmission, storage, firming capacity, grid stabilisation, has frequently exceeded the wholesa

Police presence, particularly proactive, targeted policing, reduces crime, and reductions in that presence, whether through budget cuts, withdrawal from proactive work, or officer demoralisation, are consistently followed by increases in crime, especially violent crime. The people most harmed by red

Minimum wage increases raise pay for the workers who keep their jobs at the higher rate, but the cost falls on workers at the margin, youth, casual staff, the low-skilled, and people trying to enter the workforce for the first time, who lose hours, lose shifts, or are never hired at all. Both effect

The belief that immigration broadly suppresses wages and destroys jobs for existing workers rests on the assumption that an economy contains a fixed number of jobs, and that assumption is false. Decades of research across multiple countries find immigration has small effects on average wages, with t

Government intervention in markets consistently produces outcomes that diverge from what was intended, not because policymakers are careless or malicious, but because prices carry information about scarcity and value that intervention suppresses, and decisions made without that information are syste

Government-owned enterprises systematically underperform private equivalents on cost, efficiency and service quality, not because public servants are less capable, but because they operate without the discipline of profit, loss, competition or bankruptcy that forces private enterprises to improve. W

Large-scale developmental aid, government-to-government transfers and broad budget support intended to produce lasting economic growth, has a poor record on its own stated goal, and has in many cases entrenched the corrupt governments and dependency it was meant to help overcome. Targeted humanitari

When supply is constrained, giving buyers more money to spend does not make housing more affordable, it lets sellers charge more. Twenty years of first home buyer grants in Australia have been repeatedly capitalised into higher prices, transferring the benefit from the buyers the scheme is meant to

Cutting defence spending is not a saving, it is a deferral. The cost of maintaining credible deterrence is always lower than the cost of responding after deterrence has failed, and Europe's post-Cold War experience, decades of cuts followed by a war on its border it was unprepared for, is the most r