Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a wacky libertarian economist/blogger who serves as a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Foolishness
Mitchell is a serial global warming denialist, apparently believing it to just be an excuse for bigger government or a scam by scientists to take government grants. He has gotten better about this over time but still says global warming may or may not be a serious concern and that he doesn't trust those big government environmentalists to handle the issue. He has also endorsed myths surrounding DDT, primarily the myth that Rachel Carson killed millions by inspiring environmentalists to ban DDT in areas of the world where it could have been used to fight malaria, even though there were always exemptions to DDT bans when it was used to fight malaria.

Mitchell has also tried to scare his audience from the idea of universal healthcare by making faulty claims about Britain's National Health Service. The most egregious example of this is when he wrote a column alleging that Josef Stalin would be proud of the NHS because they had allegedly starved 1,165 of their patients. This is a false claim, since the vast majority of those numbers come from people who were malnourished when they died, which doesn't mean that they died from malnourishment. The distinction is an important one since many fatal conditions make it more difficult to retain nutrients, inevitably leading to malnourishment. Nevertheless, Mitchell tried to pass this off as a government attempt to kill patients. His main source for this information was the Daily Mail (which he often cites in other columns).

For whatever reason Mitchell considers Paul Krugman his greatest enemy, probably because he's just one of the most famous Keynesians out there. Krugman has responded to Mitchell by calling him dishonest in his claims.

Despite his fervent anti-government, anti-Keynesian tendencies Mitchell has, like most libertarians, stopped clock moments, having declared the War on Drugs a failure, along with the Iraq War. He is also largely indifferent to gay marriage.