Free Republic

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.

Mainstream America is finally getting to know the billionaire brothers backing the libertarian movement, thanks to a pair of dueling profiles in New York and The New Yorker. Now that we've heard about their charitable giving, David's 240-foot mega-yacht and role as patrons of the Tea Party movement, it's time to ask a more serious question: How libertarian are they? The short answer...not very.Charles and David Koch, the secretive billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the largest private oil company in America, have spent millions bankrolling free-market think tanks and pro-business politicians in order, as David Koch has put it,...

When garden variety academics leave their ivory cocoons, they are really at a loss. Recently, Notre Dame University philosophy professor James P. Sterba tried to sell the libertarian Cato Institute on the “right” to welfare. “You’re not at the ABA anymore Jim,” his co-panelist Jan Narveson, chided him. Narveson is a professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo. Indeed, Sterba’s understanding of liberty might be more at home at the American Bar Association. “I submit that the liberty of the poor, which is the liberty not to be interfered with in taking from the surplus resources of others what is...

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...

Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA's climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group -- a staunch critic of U.S. EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gases -- petitioned the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed "endangerment finding" because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9). But climate scientists...

Control: The House and Senate climate bills contain a provision giving the president extraordinary powers in the event of a "climate emergency." As chief of staff Rahm Emanuel says, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. If you thought the House health care bill that nobody read has hidden passages that threaten our freedoms and liberty, take a peak at the "trigger" placed in the byzantine innards of both the House-passed Waxman-Markey bill and the Kerry-Boxer bill just passed by Democrats out of Sen. Barbara Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee. As Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation points...

Health Insurance: Driven by focus groups, the administration and Congress rail against insurance companies to get ObamaCare passed. So why have they been protecting the insurance companies from real competition?In a recent stop in North Carolina, President Obama told the crowd that our existing health care system "works well for the insurance industry, but it doesn't always work well for you." This shift from discussing what's in his plan to fighting the insurance bogeyman is no accident. In June, Joel Benenson, the president's chief pollster, told the Economic Club of Canada, where health care is a public scandal, that the...

For You have been a shelter for me, A strong tower from the enemy. I will abide in Your tabernacle forever; I will trust in the shelter of Your wings. (Psalm 61: 3, 4)

For someone looking to expose MSM bias, the weekend episodes of Good Morning America are a godsend, a veritable corncucopia of liberal media advocacy on display. I really should send co-anchors Kate Snow and Bill Weir gifts next Christmas in thanks for all the material they’ve supplied over the months. But, true to FinkelBlog’s pledge to dole out the kudos when the MSM has done something to deserve them, let’s acknowledge that GMA gave a fair shake today to a group of free-market economists who have come together to oppose the president’s stimulus plan, arguing instead that the government should...

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of seven books on international affairs, including America's Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan (2006). The People's Republic of China continues to send worrisome signals about its security strategy. As the tone of cross-straits relations grows increasingly strident, China's latest military reshuffle and ongoing lack of transparency about its military budget are creating new tensions with both the United States and its neighbors in East Asia. In the lead-up to the opening of the Communists' 17th National Party Congress...

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.

Jane Gravelle: After the Clinton administration proposed a fairly substantial increase in the cigarette tax as a way of funding health care reform, my colleague Dennis Zimmerman and I wrote a paper entitled "Cigarette Taxes to Fund Health Care Reform and Economic Analysis."* The part of the paper I'd like to talk about is the justifications for increasing the cigarette tax. I'm an economist, so I start with the presumptions that people have subjective preferences about what they like to do and how they spend their money and that, in general, we want to allow people to enjoy their lifetime...

Next week, the Baker-Hamilton Commission will make its recommendations on U.S. Iraq policy, and Congress will begin hearings on defense secretary nominee and Cold War realist Robert Gates. Both events will reflect the failings of the Bush administration's policy in Iraq. But even as a grudging acceptance of reality takes hold in Washington, the architects of the war are urging that we double down on the losing bet in Iraq. Amid spiraling sectarian violence, the leading advocates of invading Iraq seem now to have centered on an explanation for how their idea has driven that country to blood-soaked disaster: deposing...

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...

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...

On July 14, the U.S. Department of Education released a study that the teachers' unions are holding up as evidence that public schools are better than private schools. The study doesn't actually show this, and is riddled with methodological flaws anyway. If you tell the average American that public schools are better than private schools, she's likely to respond, "What have you been smoking?" In this case, the evidence shows that the average American is right. The study tells us nothing whatsoever about the relative quality of public and private schools. It takes raw test scores from isolated years and...

People sweltering from a heat wave in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S. might find cold comfort in the fact that the temperatures of the past few days are not the hottest on record. That "honor" belongs to a summer 76 years ago -- decades before the controversy over "man-made global warming" began."From June 1 to August 31, 1930, 21 days had high temperatures that were 100 degrees or above" in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, Patrick Michaels, senior fellow for environmental studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told Cybercast News Service. "That summer has never been approached, and it's...

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...

John Stossel thinks sweatshops are good for workers, while minimum wages hurt the poor. Controversial? Sure. Just don't call him a Conservative. "I'm a Libertarian," according to Stossel, the TV network consumer reporter turned staunch free-market defender. "I hold beliefs Conservatives abhor." Speaking at a luncheon hosted by the conservative Fraser Institute think tank yesterday, Stossel made it clear his politics don't quite fall within the traditional left or right wing spectrum. He takes no issue with gay marriage, for example, while he says sending troops to Iraq "wasn't a good idea." At the same time, lefties likely won't love...