(Published in the Wall Street Journal’s Political Diary on 8 November 2011) By Mary Kissel The Reagan revolution wasn’t an isolated movement, but one that was echoed from the shores of Britain to as far away as the Antipodes. One of the great stalwarts of that free-market agenda, Roger Kerr, passed away last month in […]
How business leaders helped save New Zealand from socialism—Lessons for Washington State
<Speech delivered to the Executive Business Roundtable of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce on January 9, 2020 at the Overlake Golf and Country Club, Medina, WA.> It’s an honor to be speaking here. The Bellevue Chamber of Commerce and other groups like it are important institutions for advocating on behalf of businesses and advancing policy […]
Socialism’s apologists ignore Venezuela’s human tragedy
Supporters of socialism have taken to suggesting that the human tragedy unfolding in Venezuela has nothing to do with socialism, rather it’s the result of the dictatorships of former President Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro. In their view, dictatorships lead to the deprivation we’re witnessing, not socialism. They’re confusing types of government and […]
New Zealand’s reforms and lessons for Washington
<This is the text of a speech delivered to the Washington Policy Center monthly breakfast on July 27, 2017> Many of you may be familiar with New Zealand’s reforms from an economic perspective, so I’m going to spend more of my talk focused on two other areas: How policies before and after the reforms impacted […]
US healthcare problems—universal healthcare is not the solution
Shortly after Bernie Sanders’s recent and weakly argued Twitter pic in support of universal healthcare, I photoshopped it into a similarly weak counter-argument and Tweeted back. However, it’s a serious topic and deserves a more thorough response. It goes without saying that the U.S. healthcare system is far from perfect. But the focus should be […]