Free Republic

The ostensible purpose of gun control legislation is to reduce firearm deaths and injuries. The restriction of access to firearms will make criminals unable to use guns to shoot people. Gun control laws will also reduce the number of accidental shootings. Those are the desired effects, at least in theory. It is important, however, for conscientious policymakers to consider not only the stated goals of gun control regulations, but the actual results that they produce. What would be the effect of depriving ordinary, law-abiding citizens from keeping arms for self-defense? One result seems certain: the law-abiding would be at a...

Cato Institute scholars Malou Innocent, Chris Edwards, Neal McCluskey, Ilya Shapiro, Jerry Taylor, Dan Mitchell and Dan Ikenson respond to President Obama's 2012 State of the Union Address.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) hearts former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), so much that Christie says it is ”completely intellectually dishonest” to compare RomneyCare to ObamaCare. Why? Because Romney didn’t raise taxes, and President Obama did. Oh. Avik (pronounced O-vik) Roy explains how Christie gets RomneyCare so very, very wrong: There isn’t a single person, left or right, who follows health policy seriously who disagrees with the assertion that Romneycare was the model for Obamacare. And Massachusetts has had to raise taxes, after Romney left office, to pay for the law’s significant cost overruns. Here are some examples,...

Hear Us Now is pleased to host Randal O’Toole of the CATO Institute on October 11th. His topic will be, “The Best Laid Plans”: […]how government attempts to do long-range, comprehensive planning inevitably do more harm than good by choking American cities with congestion, making housing markets more unaffordable, and sending the cost of government infrastructure skyrocketing.

Below are some random thoughts on Cato’s founder, Edward Crane. Consider it a free-flowing free speech exercise. Indulge me. First, the “Libertarian Party Correspondent”, Edward H. Crane III strikes one as naïve, at best. Here he is in August 1973 (Reason, Aug/Sep2008, Vol. 40, Issue 4): If there were any remaining doubts as to the viability and future of the Libertarian Party, its 1973 National Convention in Strongsville, Ohio, early in June must surely have eliminated them. The L.P. is no longer a tenuous coalition of hesitant and dubious allies but rather a united front of determined individualists committed to...

Blake Edwards, comedy director, Julie Andrews husband and Peter Sellers star-maker, has died at the age of 88. He directed “The Pink Panther,” the original, not the Roberto Benigni/Steve Martin versions, and “A Shot in the Dark” and “10″ and “SOB,” a pretty entertaining send-up of over-the-hill Hollywood. He also did “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” “Days of Wine and Roses,” “Wild Rovers,” “The Party.” The one that made perhaps the biggest splash was his gender-bending (and still old fashioned) farce “Victor/Victoria.”

The fiscal conservative-libertarians at Cato Institute have issued a report card for current governors, and they aren’t exactly generous with the praise. If a C is the minimum passing grade, then just 27 out of 50 states manage to keep from failing the test. At the top of the list, the Wall Street Journal reports, are at least two presidential aspirants — Tim Pawlenty and Bobby Jindal, and a third that gets a B, Mitch Daniels: The Cato report card gives the lowest grades to Governors who proposed or enacted the biggest tax and spending increases, while Governors who cut...

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-js031401.html

By 2012, our national debt will be larger than the entire U.S. economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. So what's on the front burner in Washington these days? Zoning issues in lower Manhattan! Is it OK to put a Muslim community center close to Ground Zero? I don't know, but local authorities don't seem to mind. That should settle it, but what Sarah Palin calls the "9/11 mosque" has somehow become a headline-grabbing controversy. On Friday, President Obama insisted that Muslims have the "same right to practice their religion as anyone else" and can build a mosque near the...

RALEIGH — North Carolina’s traffic congestion could double in the next couple of decades, with Charlotte drivers facing the same types of delays Chicago drivers face now. That was the conclusion of a 2007 John Locke Foundation report. It recommended $12 billion of spending to clear North Carolina’s congested urban roads and prepare for future traffic growth. Many traffic problems outlined three years ago continue to cause concerns today. Randal O’Toole, senior fellow with the Cato Institute, recently tackled the issue from a national perspective in the book Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It....

Rich Nukes, Poor Nukes Bethany Stotts, July 28, 2010 Last month, in a Cato Institute lecture, Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig outlined what he sees as the strategic reasons why nuclear nations help spread these weapons to other countries. The author of Exporting the Bomb: Technology Transfer and the Spread of Nuclear Weapons, Professor Kroenig argued that nuclear transfers are “driven by a strategic logic.” “My argument, in short, is that the spread of nuclear weapons threatens powerful states more than it threatens weak states and that this leads to three strategic conditions under which countries are most likely to export...

The British government is spending 50 per cent of GDP, but taking just 40 per cent in taxes. The coalition’s aim is to close that gap over the next five years (still leaving a massive accumulated debt, by the way), partly by raising taxes and partly by cutting spending. The hope is that economic growth will keep the eventual figure closer to 40 per cent than to 50. What, though, is the optimum share? The above video hazards an answer. The Rahn Curve is to state spending what the Laffer Curve is to taxation. Drawing on a mass of published...

Forecasting the Next Crisis Bethany Stotts, June 16, 2010 Johan Norberg, author of Financial Fiasco, argues that countries worldwide have set themselves up for another, more severe, worldwide financial crisis by holding interest rates artificially low and accruing government debt. “All the measures that we have taken to save the economy: the low interest rates, the massive debt, the safety net for the financial industry—these are the very things that led us into a crisis in the first place,” he said when narrating the film Overdose: The Next Financial Crisis. “We’ve been saved from the consequences of one burst bubble...

Nearly a century after the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, the Supreme Court unanimously affirmed that "marriage is one of the 'basic civil rights of man.' " That 1967 case, Loving v. Virginia, ended bans on interracial marriage in the 16 states that still had such laws. Now, 43 years after Loving, the courts are once again grappling with denial of equal marriage rights — this time to gay couples. We believe that a society respectful of individual liberty must end this unequal treatment under the law.

Homeland Insecurity Spencer Irvine, June 3, 2010 In a forum hosted by the CATO Institute on May 25, 2010, libertarian author Ben Friedman and Ohio State University professor John Mueller argued that the American public’s panic over terrorism and homeland security has cost taxpayers trillions of wasted dollars. Ben Friedman, author of the book Terrorizing America, claims that Americans, as “cognitive misers,” overestimate the possibility of harm from terrorism. This overestimation causes panic, which then is used by politicians to alarm the public even more. Friedman argued that “because this is [a] democracy, [the] public demand for overreaction…causes” the creation...

Until this past year, I would never have guessed Sen. Bob Bennett would be a top target of RINO hunters. He's made some very unpopular moves, like supporting the TARP bailout, but his ACU rating has been quite high. Nonetheless, I've been rather excited to see the RINO hunters so successful that they can move down to what I would have guessed was a low priority target. But are Utahans about to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire? Mike Lee is currently leading polls among delegates to the Utah state convention. But Lee is proudly trumpeting...

An influential conservative think tank is firing a broadside at ex-MA Gov. Mitt Romney (R), criticizing the potential WH'12 contender for a health care plan they say looks identical to Pres. Obama's. "When you run down this list of elements in the Obama plan and the Romney plan, they are all identical," says Michael Cannon, the Cato Institute's director of Health Policy Studies, in a new video running on the group's website. "Both the Romney plan and the Obama plan are essentially a government takeover of the health care sector of the economy."Romney's signature achievement during his tenure in the...

While Washington, D.C., focuses on the federal power grab in health care, there's another ongoing drive for regimentation that hasn't received the scrutiny it deserves. A panel of educators assembled by 48 state governors and school superintendents just released a uniform set of math and reading standards for the nation's students. If the Common Core State Standards Initiative were totally voluntary, there would be little to fear. But for too many education reformers, whatever is not forbidden is compulsory. Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said that "if we accomplish one thing in the coming years, it should be...

In 2002, the Vermont legislature funded a commuter train from Burlington to Charlotte, 13 miles away (see Appendix A for definitions of terms such as commuter rail, light rail, and streetcars). To ensure funds were effectively spent, the legislature set targets for the service and asked for an audit after one year. The audit found the rail line’s capital costs were more than twice the projected amounts; the operating costs were nearly three times projections; the trains carried less than half of the projected riders; and fare revenues were less than a third of projections. The audit also found that...

It’s NOT a Health Bill, NOT a Medicare Tax and It Can’t Possibly Cost Only $940 Billion Posted by Alan Reynolds * The “reconciliation bill” is not a “health bill” but an anti-health bill. It relies heavily on price controls, taxes and fines to punish doctors, hospitals and formerly innovative companies the produce prescription drugs and medical devices. If we treated farmers, food companies and grocery stores the way Congress threatens to treat the health industries would anybody expect food to become better or cheaper? * The 3.8% tax on both labor and investment income is not a “Medicare tax.”...

Last December, when President Obama launched his second escalation of the Afghan war, he did so with the unflinching support of the Republicans, the right, and neoconservativies. But a small group of conservatives, libertarians and assorted contrarians on the right has opposed the war, and yesterday I journeyed to the Cato Institute to find out whether that nucleus of anti-war opposition is significant or not. The answer: maybe, but probably not. The Cato conference was entitled "Escalate or Withdraw? Conservatives and the War in Afghanistan," and it brought together several ultra conservative members of Congress: Tom McClintock (R-CA); Dana Rohrabacher...

Looking for Patterns in Chaos Tilla Bradley, March 16, 2010 The government is constantly looking for ways to identify threats to national security before American citizens are threatened. Since the 1980s, the intelligence community has struggled with the challenges of monitoring electronic communication while protecting the privacy of its citizens. Journalist Shane Harris, the author of The Watcher: The Rise of the U.S. Surveillance State addresses these challenges and the solutions that the government is attempting to develop in his latest book. Also on the panel to comment on the book were former journalist, and analyst with the Cato Institute...

When Dorothy and her friends finally reach Oz, they present themselves to the almighty Wizard, only to eventually discover that he is just an illusion maintained by a charlatan hiding behind a curtain. This seems eerily akin to to the state of Keynesian economics. It does not matter that Keynesianism isn’t working for Obama. It does not matter that it didn’t work for Bush, or for Japan in the 1990s, or for Hoover and Roosevelt in the 1930s. In the ultimate triumph of theory over reality, the Keynesians say all that matters is the macroeconomic model behind the curtain showing...

Gay People & Conservatives Tilla Bradley, March 3, 2010 The libertarian Cato Institute’s panel discussion, “Is There a Place for Gay People in Conservatism and Conservative Politics?,” preceded the appearance of Gay rights activists at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Panelists at Cato included Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of New Republic and currently a blogger with The Daily Dish Blog, Nick Herbert, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, Conservative Party, United Kingdom, and Maggie Gallaher, the president of the National Organization for Marriage. Herbert gave a presentation on the UK’s Conservative Party’s inclusion and...

Which U.S. president ranks as America's greatest depression fighter?

In recent months, the most influential political party in the country may not be the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but the Tea Party. This murky, largely leaderless grassroots movement has been the driving force behind the derailment of President Barack Obama's dearest agenda items, notably health care reform and climate change legislation. What are the goals of this movement? In part, that is the wrong question. The Tea Party effort rejects the notion that a politician or a pundit should define their movement. Rather, citizens themselves will tell us what the movement means. As their name suggests, these...

The Cato Institute analysis of the Obama State of the Union speech: [VIDEO AT SITE] The only part of this response I disagree with is at the very end when Malou Innocent says troops should be withdrawn from Afghanistan and that the war can not be won. Marc Thiessen tackles Obama's whining about Republicans on the issue of terrorism: Read more at floppingaces.net...

Tomorrow night, an embattled President Obama will deliver his 2010 State of the Union. He originally wanted to give it on Feb. 2, but — adding to a string of recent indignities — had to yield after irate Lost fans made clear they wouldn't put up with their season premiere getting pre-empted by a lousy presidential speech. Lost is a silly show — a six-year-long Twilight Zone episode doomed to end in disappointment. But you can hardly blame Americans for preferring it to the SOTU, a dull and tacky spectacle that celebrates our retreat from limited, constitutional government. The Constitution...

Will the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision destroy American democracy? You might think so given the responses of its critics. The Citizens United decision, far from signaling the fall of the republic, strengthens the First Amendment and freedom of speech. Let's start with the facts of the case. Citizens United, a nonprofit political advocacy group, produced a film called "Hillary: The Movie" about the current Secretary of State, who at the time was a presidential candidate. The movie did not reflect well on Ms. Clinton but did not explicitly advocate her defeat in the 2008 presidential contest. Citizens United planned...

Health Care: Will the administration seize the moment of Scott Brown's victory to work out real solutions, or will it follow Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over the cliff? Or is it just about government control? Before Sen.-elect Brown became the Scott heard 'round the world, House Speaker Pelosi was asked what his victory in the bluest of blue states would mean. "Certainly the dynamic will change depending on what happens in Massachusetts," she replied in a bit of an understatement. The dynamic has changed, yet the Democrats, as the country song goes, apparently don't know when to hold them...

With friends like Jerome R. Corsi, the American free-enterprise system is in more trouble than we feared. Corsi should be on the right side of the battle to defend economic freedom. Before the 2008 election, he wrote a popular book with a great title, The Obama Nation, warning that Barack Obama was not the man we needed in the White House. But in his latest book, America for Sale: Fighting the New World Order, Surviving a Global Depression, and Preserving USA Sovereignty, he sounds a lot more like Obama than like Ronald Reagan, the former president he professes to admire....

House and Senate Democrats have produced health care legislation whose mandates, subsidies, tax penalties, and health insurance regulations would penalize work and reward Americans who refuse to purchase health insurance. As a result, the legislation could trap many Americans in low-wage jobs and cause even higher health-insurance premiums, government spending, and taxes than are envisioned in the legislation. Those mandates and subsidies would impose effective marginal tax rates on low-wage workers that would average between 53 and 74 percent— and even reach as high as 82 percent—over broad ranges of earned income. By comparison, the wealthiest Americans would face tax...

Writing for Forbes, Bruce Bartlett puts forth an interesting hypothesis that healthcare legislation could have been made better (hopefully he meant to write “less destructive”) if the GOP had been willing to compromise with Democrats: Democrats desperately wanted a bipartisan bill and would have given a lot to get a few Republicans on board. This undoubtedly would have led to enactment of a better health bill than the one we are likely to get. But Republicans never put forward an alternative health proposal. Instead, they took the position that our current health system is perfect just as it is. Bruce...

"The heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism," Ronald Reagan said on many occasions, including a speech at Vanderbilt University when I was an undergraduate. I'm not so sure. But at least the conservatism of Sen. Robert Taft, Sen. Barry Goldwater, and Reagan stood for a limited constitutional government in opposition to the federal aggrandizement of the New Deal and the Great Society. Back in the FDR-JFK-LBJ years, conservatives even stood for congressional government and against the imperial presidency. But what does conservatism stand for today, other than opposition to President Obama? President Bush expanded entitlements, increased federal spending by...

With the Christmas season and its promise of "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men" upon us, and protectionist sentiment stirring in Washington, it is appropriate to revisit the question of whether free trade promotes world peace. Advocates of free trade have long argued that its benefits are not merely economic. Free trade also encourages people and nations to live in peace with one another. Free trade raises the cost of war by making nations more economically interdependent. Free trade makes it more profitable for people of one nation to produce goods and services for people of another nation than to...

Michael F. Cannon from The Cato Institute writes about the trickery involved by Democrats in estimating how much the behemoth known as ObamaCare will cost and what the real cost of the Socialism will be: One gimmick makes the new entitlement spending appear smaller by not opening the spigot until late in the official 10-year budget window (2010–2019). Correcting for that gimmick in the Senate version, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) estimates, “When all this new spending occurs” — i.e., from 2014 through 2023 — “this bill will cost $2.5 trillion over that ten-year period.” Another gimmick pushes much of the...

Take My Medicare Malcolm A. Kline, November 20, 2009 In the usual manner in which bad ideas become even worse reality, good chunks of what policy wonks here are calling “health care reform” are flowing out of academia. Arguably, the most pernicious of these is the notion that “the federal government can build on the success of Medicare.” Lawmakers from both parties would have winced at such a brain wave ten years ago when both President Clinton and the Republican Congress, albeit using markedly different approaches, attempted to reform Medicare. What a difference a decade makes. That the federal government’s...

On April 16 in NRO, Daniel T. Griswold, the head of immigration policy for the libertarian Cato Institute attacked National Review complaining that in three "consecutive" issues, "anti-immigrant crusaders," including John O'Sullivan and Mark Krikorian, have "pushed every button to whip up hostility to immigration." Let us ignore the nasty smears....focus on Griswold's substantive position. Near the end of the NRO article Griswold insists that he is not for "open borders," but his record suggests otherwise. A story in the Christian Science Monitor (August 30, 2000) by Scott Baldauf is particularly revealing. Baldauf describes a new project of the Immigration...

Iranian Preconditions Sarah Carlsruh, November 13, 2009 “Can the United States Affect Iran’s Nuclear Ambitions?” was the topic of the Cato Institute’s November 3rd forum. Matthew Duss, National Security Researcher at the Center for American Progress, focused on the diverse and factionalizing environment within Iran, arguing that on June 12th, the date of Iran’s tenth presidential election, “the game changed.” Duss identified a trend where, post-June 12th, “large sections of the clerical establishment [are breaking] away from the regime.” Iran’s green movement, the pro-democracy movement which was triggered by June’s disputed elections, is diverse, claimed Duss: Some want a reform...

Atomic Alarmism Sarah Carlsruh, November 10, 2009 Struggling to decide between confrontation and engagement, the Obama administration is engaging in diplomatic talks with Iran, but has not yet ruled out force as an option. If the Obama administration were to believe John Mueller’s book, Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda, they could abandon diplomatic engagement completely and rest easy. Mueller, who spoke at the Cato Institute on October 29th and is the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at Ohio State University, called his book a “cure for insomnia,” since it should ease late-night fears of...

REPUBLICAN David Harmer knows the odds. His Democratic challenger in the 10th congressional district special election, Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, has more money and name recognition in the heavily Democratic district. <snip> "One of my heroes said, and I am paraphrasing here, that a majority has never been necessary to prevail but what it takes is an irate and tireless minority keen to set fresh fires of freedom in people's minds," Harmer said. "Whether a Republican can carry this seat depends on how badly the voters want to send a message to both parties than an explosion of (government) spending...

Killer Health Care by: Sarah Carlsruh, October 09, 2009 David Goldhill, owner of the Game Show Network, published an article in the September 2009 The Atlantic called “How American Health Care Killed My Father”, and, on October 2nd, discussed the implications of his article in an event hosted by the Cato Institute. Goldhill considers himself “not an expert on health care” but, rather, “like 300 million other people, [a] customer of health care.” Goldhill’s interest in health care was triggered when his father went to the hospital for a case of pneumonia and died, not from the effects of pneumonia,...

The Cato Institute today announced the launch of "Downsizing the Federal Government," a new website aimed at providing policymakers, media and the public with comprehensive data on federal spending. The federal government is running massive all-time record budget deficits, spending too much, and heading toward a financial crisis. Without a change of direction in Washington, average working families will be faced with huge tax increases and a lower standard of living. This makes the launching of this website especially timely and applicable.

The debate over No Child Left Behind re-authorization is upon us. Except it isn’t. In his recent speech kicking off the discussion, education secretary Arne Duncan asked not whether the central federal education law should be reauthorized, he merely asked how. Let’s step back a bit, and examine why we should end federal intervention in (and spending on) our nation’s schools… in one thousand words or less:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- The U.S. military can pull most of its troops from Afghanistan in the next year as "victory" is not a realistic outcome, a report by the Cato Institute says. Malou Innocent and Ted Galen Carpenter in an authoritative report on the conflict in Afghanistan note that "a definitive, conventional 'victory' is not a realistic option." Washington said its strategy in Afghanistan is focused in part on denying al-Qaida and other militants the opportunity to establish a safe haven in the embattled nation. The authors, however, opine that denying a sanctuary to terrorists does not require...

The OECD is combatting Tax Havens according to this report and a meeting of cooperating countries in Mexico City. If the link doesn't get to this video, you need to search for "OECD Taking on Tax Havens". http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1236539937&play=1

Free or FAIR Immigration? by: Anthony Kang, August 28, 2009 A new study published by the Cato Institute asserts that current U.S. immigration laws and policies run counter to the economic wellness of U.S. households and advocates legalization of illegal immigrants through visa-taxing in order to maximize immigration’s benefit. The methodology utilized in the study consists of seven different simulations, measuring six factors, and forecasts the respective long-run economic effects on the welfare of U.S. households by the year 2019. The six different effects included in each simulation include: a) direct effect: the change in U.S. gross domestic product (GDP)...

The chief executive of the United States is no longer a mere constitutional officer charged with faithful execution of the laws. He is a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise. He — or she — is the one who answers the phone at 3 a.m. to keep our children safe from harm. The modern president is America's shrink, a social worker, our very own national talk show host. He's also the Supreme Warlord of the Earth. This messianic campaign rhetoric merely reflects what the office has evolved into after...

Snip... Figure 1 looks at average wages. In 2008, the average wage for 1.9 million federal civilian workers was $79,197, which compared to an average $49,935 for the nation’s 108 million private sector workers (measured in full-time equivalents). The figure shows that the federal pay advantage (the gap between the lines) is steadily increasing.

Sarah Palin has followed up her health care call to arms posted yesterday on her Facebook Notes page with another post today titled "Some Useful Commentary on the Health Care Debate." This latest posting is a bibliography of sorts, including editorials, op-eds and a video of a Cato Institute health care forum. Sources cited by the former governor range from pundit Mark Steyn to former Reagan economic advisor Arthur Laffer. Rather than repost it all here, we'll give Sarah Palin's Facebook Notes the page hits it deserves with this link. If yesterday's health care post by the 2008 GOP vice...