Travel becomes much more interesting to me when a city is not treated simply as a collection of landmarks. A cathedral is also evidence of religious institutions, accumulated capital, technology, and political authority. A medieval city gate tells us something about security and collective organization. A stock exchange reveals another stage in the development of commerce. Even the location of a city may help explain why it became wealthy, politically important, or repeatedly contested. Seen this way, traveling through Europe can become a form of reading history in physical space.
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How Long Should It Take to Start a Business? Economic Freedom, Bureaucracy, and the Jobs Spain Never Sees
How long should a citizen have to wait before being allowed to create a firm? The question sounds administrative, but it is fundamentally economic and political. A new firm is not merely a registration in a government database. It can become a workplace, a source of income for a family, a competitor that forces established firms to improve, or the first opportunity for someone who has been unemployed to enter the labor market. When the state makes entry unnecessarily slow, expensive, or uncertain, the cost is therefore borne not only by the entrepreneur standing at the administrative counter. It is also borne by people whose jobs, wages, products, and opportunities may never come into existence.
Continue readingWho Really Pays the Corporate Tax? Investment, Jobs, and the Politics of Taxing Firms
A corporate tax is legally paid by a corporation, but a corporation is not a person standing apart from society with an independent capacity to bear economic pain. A firm is a network of workers, owners, consumers, suppliers, and investments. When government taxes corporate profits, the legal liability may appear on the company’s tax return, but the economic burden can be distributed through lower returns to owners, weaker investment, lower wages, fewer jobs, or higher prices. This is why corporate taxation is not a technical argument about whether one sympathizes with “business.” It is a question about capital formation and, ultimately, about the opportunities available to ordinary people.
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