Free Republic

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)...