Free Republic

Here we go again. HillaryCare is back, and its apparent that Sen. Clinton has learned little since the American people overwhelmingly rejected her last attempt to overhaul the U.S. health care system. Once again her plan, which would cost $110 billion per year in new taxes, calls for greater government control over American health care. If her plan were to pass this time, it would mean higher taxes, lost jobs, less patient choice, and poorer quality health care. Among the worst features of her proposal: An individual mandate. Sen. Clinton would require every American to purchase health insurance or face...

The New York Times is right that Fred Thompson's strong support of federalism makes him an intellectual heir of Ronald Reagan. Central to Reagan's campaign for president was his belief that the federal government was too big and that there should be an "orderly transfer" of federal activities back to the states and the people. Kudos to Thompson for injecting federalism back into public discussion. Thompson is right that federalism "is a tool to promote freedom." All the Republican candidates should do less griping about "pork" spending, and put their efforts into plans for abolishing major agencies and reviving the...

Members of the 110th Congress haven’t been shy about expressing their disdain for trade. No fewer than two dozen trade-related bills, almost all of which are antagonistic toward U.S. trade partners or outright protectionist, were introduced in the first seven months of this Congress. While some of those bills were crafted mostly for political effect, it is pretty clear that some hostile trade legislation will at least make it to the floors of both chambers this session or next. With Congress adjourned for August recess, here’s where things stand. For all intents and purposes, the completed bilateral trade agreements with...

Contrary to what Americans hear constantly from the media, Venezuelans have a poor opinion of their president, Hugo Chavez, and a positive opinion of Americans and the United States. As a senior Venezuelan currently living in the U.S. while keeping up-to-date with Venezuelan affairs (I am also a former member of the Venezuelan congress), I have come to accept that Venezuela generally merits little attention from U.S. society, except in three or four areas: baseball players, beautiful women, oil and the antics of Hugo Chavez. Hugo Chavez' September 2006 UN speech in which he called President Bush a "devil" and...

The Treasury Department reported Friday that federal revenues reached $2.12 trillion ($2,120,000,000,0000) for the first ten months of fiscal year 2007. In both current and inflation-adjusted dollars, that puts the federal government on course for the most revenue it’s ever collected in a year. Indeed, it’s the most revenue any government in the history of the world has ever collected. And yet it’s not enough to satisfy the voracious appetites of the spenders in Congress and the administration. Spending was $2.27 trillion for the same ten months. It seems that the deficit problem in Washington is not a result of...

Though many people consider Portland, Oregon, a model of 21st-century urban planning, the region’s integrated land-use and transportation plans have greatly reduced the area’s livability. To halt urban sprawl and reduce people’s dependence on the automobile, Portland’s plans use an urban-growth boundary to greatly increase the area’s population density, spend most of the region’s transportation funds on various rail transit projects, and promote construction of scores of high-density, mixed-use developments. When judged by the results rather than the intentions, the costs of Portland’s planning far outweigh the benefits. Planners made housing unaffordable to force more people to live in multifamily...

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the committee, thank you for inviting me to speak today. I’m here to talk about police militarization, a troubling trend that’s been on the rise in America’s police departments over the last 25 years. Militarization is a broad term that refers to using military-style weapons, tactics, training, uniforms, and even heavy equipment by civilian police departments. It’s a troubling trend because the military has a very different and distinct role than our domestic peace officers. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are supposed to protect us while upholding our constitutional...

Ladies and Gentlemen, It is a great pleasure to visit again your world-famous institute and to see many friends here. Thank you for the invitation. I met your President Edward Crane 5 weeks ago in Chicago at the Milton Friedman Memorial Service and he said: “the invitation is permanently open”. So I am here. I came here today as a president of the free and democratic Czech Republic, of a country which – now already more than 17 years ago – succeeded in getting rid of Communism, of a country which quite rapidly, smoothly and without unnecessary additional costs overcame...

With former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson creeping ever closer to a formal announcement that he will run for president, it is worth asking whether he is the genuine small-government conservative that has been missing from the top tier of the Republican field (with all due apologies to Ron Paul). A preliminary look at his record suggests that while he is not quite the second coming of Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan, he may be much better on most issues than the alternatives.

With the Memorial Day weekend here, Congress appears determined to leave no bad idea behind in their frantic quest to demonstrate that they feel the voters' pain over high gasoline prices. Tuesday, they voted to sick the Justice Department on OPEC for violating U.S. anti-trust laws (good luck with that). Wednesday, they voted to ban service stations from taking "unfair advantage" of motorists and outlawed "unconscionably excessive" prices for gasoline and other fuels were the president to declare an energy emergency. What constitutes taking "unfair advantage"? Congress doesn't say. Apparently, taking "fair advantage" of motorists is O.K. And what is...

Although there will no doubt be a winner in their straw poll of Republican presidential favorites for ’08, many participants at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington March 1-3 voiced to me dissatisfaction with the current field -- all of whom except John McCain addressed the conclave of 6,000-plus conservatives at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. “I haven’t given it much thought,” Jennifer Graf, who managed the winning anti-affirmative action initiative in Michigan last November, told me when I asked her favorite for the GOP in ’08. Similarly, Diane Schachterle, who works in the office of affirmative action foe...

100 Hours: Honest Leadership and Open Government John Samples, director of Cato's Center for Representative Government and author of The Fallacy Of Campaign Finance Reform: The ethics part of this agenda evokes a limited sense of déjà vu. On their first day in power in 1995, the House Republicans cut House staff, changed budgeting rules, enacted term limits for their leadership, banned proxy voting in committee, opened committee hearings to the public, required a three-fifths vote to increase taxes, started a comprehensive audit of the House, and applied anti-discrimination and workplace safety rules to Congress itself. Later they passed...

Has Our Time Come? http://www.hereticalideas.com/ A **new study from the Cato Institute [see link below] suggests that libertarians might be the new swing vote. The libertarian vote is in play. At some 13 percent of the electorate, it is sizable enough to swing elections. Pollsters, political strategists, candidates, and the media should take note of it. After examining the relevant polling data, Cato concludes that libertarians and libertarian sympathizers constitute somewhere between 10 and 20% of the American population. Some explanations are offered as to why libertarians constitute such a bigger constituency than one might expect. First is that libertarians...

The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. gave Gov. Bill Owens a D grade for his fiscal performance during his last year in office in a report released this week. The Libertarian-leaning think tank releases a report card every two years for all 50 governors based on 23 criteria gathered from various sources, such as the U.S. census and budget data provided by state governments. According to the report, Owens “engineered one of the biggest falls from grace in this report card’s 16-year history.” The institute blasted Owens for his support of Referendum C, which was passed by voters last November...

North Korea's announcement that it had successfully tested a nuclear device has renewed concerns that other countries in the region will follow suit. These are not idle concerns. Given Japan's existing nuclear power program, and its advanced technical and industrial base, it could likely develop nuclear weapons in a matter of months. But it is far from certain that Japan will go that route, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was quick to dampen speculation about an ensuing arms race. "Possession of nuclear arms is not an option at all for our country," Mr. Abe said after the North Korean test....

The folks at the conservative-leaning Cato Institute have published their annual report card on the fiscal policy of the nation's governors. And they've dropped Arnold Schwarzenegger's budget score from an 'A' to a 'D.' The Cato report is here. It uses about two dozen different measures of fiscal performance, generally grading spending cuts and tax cuts as better, and spending and tax hikes as worse. So why did they drop his grade? "After one year of of aggressive budget cutting, " the report says, "he has let the big spenders in Sacramento get to him." The Cato report says California's...

Give Divided Government a Chance by William A. Niskanen William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute and was a former member and acting chairman of President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. For those of you with a partisan bent, I have some bad news. Our federal government may work better (well, less badly) when at least one house of Congress is controlled by the opposing party. Divided government is, curiously, less divisive. It's also cheaper. The basic reason for this is simple: When one party proposes drastic or foolish measures, the other party can obstruct them. The United...

Robert A. Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of the forthcoming Cato Institute paper "Suicide Terrorism and Democracy: What We've Learned since 9/11." The attacks of September 11th, 2001 brought us face to face with the horror of suicide terrorism. In the years since, pundits have painted al Qaeda as a fearless enemy motivated by insatiable religious hatred. Amid prognostications of doom, we lost sight of the truth: that suicide terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and that beneath the religious rhetoric with which it is perpetrated, it occurs largely in...

The fatal flaw in the "war on terror" has always been its open-endedness. The president of the United States is never going to sit down on a battleship to sign a peace treaty with terrorism. So when we give the government special, allegedly temporary powers to fight terrorism, we're essentially handing over that power permanently. And of course, it's likely that even if we were to defeat Al Qaeda for good, there will be more terrorists attacks, be it from other Islamic fundamentalist groups or from homegrown terrorists like Timothy McVeigh. But as we approach the five-year anniversary of Sept....

Federal tax receipts continue to soar, with the individual income tax now expected to rise about 15 percent this year and the corporate tax by 20 percent. A year ago, when people noticed tax receipts were going to be up by 15 percent, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman tried to dismiss it as "a temporary blip." That card can't be played twice. The Bush team, on the other hand, has an odd habit of describing reductions in marginal tax rates as "tax relief." But the phrase "tax relief" surely implies taxpayers are paying less in taxes when, in fact,...

News Release June 8, 2006 Media Contact: (202) 789-5200 Cato Institute Experts Comment on the Death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the Future of Iraq WASHINGTON – Cato Institute foreign policy experts are available to discuss the latest events in Iraq. Contact the media relations department to arrange an interview: (202) 789-5200, pr@cato.org. Christopher Preble, Cato Institute, director of foreign policy studies: "The death of Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is welcomed by all civilized people. Zarqawi terrorized the Iraqi population, and engaged in some of the most brutal acts of the insurgency, including beheadings and the slaughter of countless...

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Today the Cato Institute is publishing a paper I've written on why a federal amendment banning gay marriage is a bad idea, even if you oppose gay marriage. Of course, if you think recognizing same-sex marriages is a good idea, that's a strong reason by itself to oppose an amendment banning them. This paper is written for conservatives and moderates who either oppose or are unsure about same-sex marriage. Here's the executive summary: Members of Congress have proposed a constitutional amendment preventing states from recognizing same-sex marriages. Proponents of the Federal Marriage Amendment claim that an amendment is needed immediately...

Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the subcommittee: My name is Roger Pilon. I am a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies. I want to thank Congressman Shays for inviting me to testify on the subject of these hearings, "The Federalism Debate: Why Doesn't Washington Trust the States?" I want also to commend the subcommittee for holding these hearings, for the federalism debate is, without doubt, the most important political, legal, and constitutional debate taking place in America today, going to our very roots as a nation. At the same time, I...

Featuring the author, Steven Malanga, Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; with comments by David Lublin, American University; and moderated by John Samples, Director, Center for Representative Government, Cato Institute. The Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001 Watch the Event in Real Video http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbf-07-20-05.ram Listen to the Event in Real Audio (Audio Only) http://www.cato.org/realaudio/cbfa-07-20-05.ram American politics has become a contest between those who benefit from an ever-expanding public sector and those who pay for this bigger government—the tax eaters vs. the taxpayers. In The New New Left, Steven Malanga shows how coalitions of public employee unions, workers at government-funded...

Why is it that when it comes to the economy, Republicans can't seem to do anything right? Sure, President Bush and a GOP Congress cut taxes. But as any good economic conservative knows, the real measure of the size of government is not taxes but government spending. Those same Republicans have been on a spending spree that would make Lyndon Johnson blush. Conservatives raised a stink at the prospect of abortion-rights supporter Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) becoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. But where is the outrage when Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) harasses oil companies for...

In recent judicial confirmation battles, President Bush has repeatedly—and correctly—stressed fidelity to the Constitution as the key qualification for service as a judge. It is also the key qualification for service as the nation's chief executive. On January 20, 2005, for the second time, Mr. Bush took the presidential oath of office set out in the Constitution, swearing to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." With five years of the Bush administration behind us, we have more than enough evidence to make an assessment about the president's commitment to our fundamental legal charter Unfortunately, far from...

From 1997 -- For those that haven't seen it and that we never forget the treachery of the Left revising history as they have done with the Patriot Act/wiretaps and other assorted 'outrages' du jour...here's one to keep on hand to counter the loons. It also outlines Clinton intentions on other forms of searches, censorship, internet, etc., and we could expect the same from his co-prez at the time when she runs: [ snip ] Warrantless "National Security" Searches The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General...

This week, I attended part of the immigration demonstrations in Washington, D.C. Having lived in D.C. for more than five years now, I’ve seen quite a few protests. But this week, I saw families. I saw couples, extended families, and kids in strollers, or riding on their fathers’ shoulders. There were no topless women, giant puppets, or "Bush = Hitler" posters. Instead I saw signs indicating the pride Hispanic immigrants take in doing much of the grunt work in the United States. *snip* Immigration opponents frequently claim that Mexican immigrants are crime prone, more likely to be on public assistance,...

TESTIMONY OF DANIEL GRISWOLD Director, Cato Institute Center for Trade Policy Studies before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration,Border Security andCitizenship May 26, 2005 "The Need for Comprehensive Immigration Reform: Serving Our National Economy" Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting the Cato Institute to testify today on the subject of immigration reform and the U.S. economy. Our current immigration system is fundamentally out of step with the realities of American life and desperately needs comprehensive reform. Immigrants play an important part in the success of America's free-enterprise economy. Immigrant workers willingly fill...

N ew Hampshire had New England's lowest per capita taxes, and it was the only state in the union whose residents didn't see a tax increase in 2005. Nationally, states collected a total of $649 billion in taxes in the 2005 budget year, which ended in June for most states, according to a report yesterday by the Census Bureau. That's $2,192 per person. The numbers include only taxes collected by states. They do not include federal or local taxes, which can greatly increase a person's taxes. All states collected more taxes in 2005 than they did in 2004. And every...

RONALD REAGAN’S Eleventh Commandment famously ordered his party: Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican. For ambitious and bitchy politicians, it was always a demanding precept and in practice they have obeyed it about as assiduously as they’ve kept the seventh (or for that matter the sixth) of the decalogue of Moses. But the great unwieldy and shifting coalition of the Republican Party has somehow managed to hold itself together rather better than the infamously feuding Democrats, whose favourite form of assembly has long been the circular firing squad. Not any more. Republicans are falling out among themselves...

If the ancient political wisdom is correct that a charge unanswered is a charge agreed to, the Bush White House pleaded guilty yesterday at the Cato Institute to some extraordinary allegations. "We did ask a few members of the Bush economic team to come," explained David Boaz, the think tank's executive vice president, as he moderated a discussion between two prominent conservatives about President Bush. "We didn't get that." Now why would the administration pass up such an invitation? Well, it could have been because of the first speaker, former Reagan aide Bruce Bartlett. Author of the new book "Impostor:...

The Constitution was written and ratified to secure liberty through limited government. Central to its design were two principles: federalism and economic liberty. But at the beginning of the 20th century, Progressives began a frontal assault on those principles. Drawing on the new social sciences and a primitive understanding of economic relationships, their efforts reached fruition during the New Deal when the Constitution was essentially rewritten, without benefit of amendment. In a new Cato book, Richard Epstein traces this history, showing how Progressives replaced competitive markets with government-created cartels and monopolies. Please join us for a discussion of the roots...

Jerry Taylor and Peter Van Doren are senior fellows. Peter VanDoren is also editor of Cato's Regulation magazine. To the casual observer, one of the most striking things about President Bush’s State of the Union address on Tuesday was his wholesale adaptation of the Democratic party’s rhetoric regarding energy. Vowing to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy,” after all, is heady stuff and the sine qua non of the environmental Left. Careful viewers, however, will note that the energy initiatives forwarded in the speech amounted to little more than modest increases in the amount of money already going to programs in...

Restricting Cold Medicine Won't Curb Meth Use by Radley Balko Radley Balko is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute. Despite 30 years and many billions of dollars spent on the Drug War, America's appetite for illicit drugs really hasn’t subsided. It merely shifts, as the same drugs (or incarnations of them) come in and out of vogue. Inevitably, reaction from media, politicians and regulators to a particular drug's fashionability is overblown and does little to diminish actual abuse. Instead, efforts to thwart drug use often result in costly, needless hassling of law-abiding people that chip away at civil liberties...

The nation's 16 million state and local government workers form a large, growing and well-compensated class in society, says Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. According to Edwards: State and local workers earned $36 per hour in wages and benefits in 2005, compared to $24 for private sector workers. School teachers and administrators increased 22 percent between 1994-2004; by contrast, the number of children in public schools increased only 9 percent during the same period. Police, fire, corrections and legal staff grew on average 21 percent over the last decade. State and local health bureaucracies...

The nation’s strong economic growth is creating a tax-revenue boom for the states. State tax revenues jumped 8.7 percent in 2004 and about 8 percent in 2005. About three-quarters of state governments had tax-revenue growth of 6 percent or more in 2005. What will the states do with their overflowing coffers? During the revenue boom of the 1990s, states allowed their budgets to bloat as they expanded programs such as Medicaid to unsustainable levels. When the recession hit in 2001 and revenues stagnated, state officials moaned that they were innocent victims of a fiscal crisis. They responded by hiking taxes...

Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies: "President Bush recognizes that keeping government spending under control is a vital element in any plan to help the economy grow. A government that spends an increasingly larger share of GDP each year hurts the economy. Unfortunately, the president and the Republican Congress have passed budgets that grew faster than the economy, causing government spending to go from a 20-year low of 18% of GDP in 2001 to over 20% of GDP today. "Mr. Bush proposed cuts in spending of around $14 billion. In a government that spends $2.7 trillion, a spending cut of...

January 5, 2006 Policy Analysis no. 559 A Desire Named Streetcar: How Federal Subsidies Encourage Wasteful Local Transit Systems by Randal O'Toole Randal O'Toole is director of the Thoreau Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. Executive Summary The nation's mass transit system is a classic example of how special interests prevail over the needs and interests of voters and taxpayers. Total inflation-adjusted subsidies to transit?buses and trains?have more than doubled since 1990, yet total ridership has increased by less than 10 percent. Train ridership has dropped dramatically while automobile use has skyrocketed. Prior to 1964, when...

With no real issues to promote, Democrats are putting all their eggs into the basket of corruption to restore their political fortunes. They and their friends in the mainstream media are working overtime to connect everyone and everything on the right side of the political spectrum to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who has pleaded guilty to multiple felonies. One channel that Democrats and liberals are working is tying conservative think tanks to the Abramoff scandal. They know that these think tanks have been one of the most effective forces in Washington over the last 30 years in advancing a...

Following is an excerpt of the Op-Ed Clinton's Deputy Atty. General Jamie Gorelick wrote arguing for the Presidential authority to conduct searches without warrants. Freepmail me for the entire Op-Ed. ****************************************************** The Post's editorial asserts that warrantless searches to gather intelligence on the activities of foreign powers or their agents in the United States are "sharply at odds with the Fourth Amendment. The federal courts of appeal have recognized that such searches, carried out since the earliest days of our republic, are a valid exercise of the president's constitutional responsibilities to conduct foreign affairs and protect national security and fall...

Very long article, here's a sample: The Clinton administration has repeatedly attempted to play down the significance of the warrant clause. In fact, President Clinton has asserted the power to conduct warrantless searches, warrantless drug testing of public school students, and warrantless wiretapping. Warrantless "National Security" Searches The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his...

Executive Summary America's intelligence agencies should devote their resources to the most serious security threats, principally international terrorism and adverse political trends. Instead, the Clinton administration has diverted the intelligence community to economic espionage. The economic espionage mission is based on faulty assumptions and damages relations with governments whose cooperation we may need in dealing with significant security threats. Indeed, Washington's use of the Central Intelligence Agency for economic spying has already led to ugly incidents with Japan and France. The focus on commercial espionage also creates a myopic perspective from which developments such as massive corruption in another country...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 - A senior scholar at the Cato Institute, the respected libertarian research organization, has resigned after revelations that he took payments from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in exchange for writing columns favorable to his clients.

Congress is being criticized for funding pork projects and for a general lack of fiscal restraint. Many people agree that there is a spending problem in Washington, but not many understand the fundamental causes. Why have Republicans abandoned their pledge in the 1994 Contract with America to cut "government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money"? Did the GOP simply decide that it was good politics to buy votes with lavish special-interest spending? That is one cause of the budget crisis, but not the core problem. With the extraordinarily high reelection rates in Congress,...

(Global warming exchange cordial) A libertarian from the conservative Cato Institute and a liberal environmentalist from the Sierra Club debated global warming, energy policy and the role of government with humor and thoughtfulness - without once raising their voices - Monday night in Madison. The only hot air was in the ironically overheated auditorium at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Sierra Club national director Carl Pope and Jerry Taylor, a senior fellow with the Cato Institute, actually agreed on several things. They agreed that government has a role in protecting people and property, and that if people are harmed by global...

Neal McCluskey is an education policy analyst at the Cato Institute. American higher education is getting dangerously fat. Unfortunately, the federal government's idea of a diet is to feed colleges more and cut back on their exercise. The signs of bloat are clear. According to a recent report from the College Board, between 2004 and 2005 — what seems like the hundredth straight year — the average price of tuition grew faster than inflation. Consider some of the recent binges the money went to pay for: American University president Benjamin Ladner, whose $633,000 salary and substantial university-owned house apparently weren't...

If General Motors itself were one big car, its “check engine” light would be flashing. The world’s largest car maker announced this week that it plans to shed 30,000 workers by 2008 as its market share and stock price continue to slide against a backdrop of unsustainable labor costs. In the past 25 years, GM has seen its share of domestic automobile and light truck sales fall from half to a quarter. In the last quarter alone, it lost more than $1 billion and its corporate bonds were recently downgraded to junk status. The recent job cuts follow years of...

Episode 9: Utica With Scipio and Cato defeated, Caesar returns home to a hero's welcome. Vorenus and Pullo's showdown with local thug Erastes gets an unexpected reprieve from Caesar. Servilia's plan to use Octavia to unearth a secret about Caesar backfires. Don't miss the all new episode "Utica", Sunday, October 30th at 9PM ET.