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Total 323 results found since Jan 2013.

Putin’s Speech and the Russian–Western Impasse
Emma Ashford Today at the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave his annual address to the Federal Assembly. The speech made the news for its antagonistic tone and, in particular, for Putin’s comparison of Crimea with Jerusalem. But for all the hype surrounding the speech, it said little new, emphasizing instead the impasse that Russia and the West find themselves locked in. Putin’s message was clear: Russia’s foreign policy is not changing. The foreign policy narratives pervading the speech were strongly familiar, reiterating the points made by Russian leaders and state-owned television throughout the last ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 5, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Emma Ashford Source Type: blogs

When Liberty Knocked Down the Berlin Wall
Doug Bandow It’s easy to be pessimistic about the future of liberty.  Yet sometimes freedom advances with extraordinary speed.  Like 25 years ago in Europe. As 1989 dawned communism had ruled what was the Russian Empire reborn for seven decades.  The system failed to fulfill its promise of human liberation, but survived with the backing of secret police, gulags, and the Red Army. Then in an instant it all was swept away.  On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was open.  One of the most dramatic symbols of human tyranny was gone.  Tens of thousands of East Germans were imprisoned for “Repub...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 11, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs

Not These Guys Again! The Case for Term Limits
David Boaz At NBCNews.com, I make the case for term limits in a video sidebar to Meet the Press. For those who prefer print, I summarize my argument here (not all of which survived NBC’s editing): Only 15 percent of Americans approve of Congress’s performance. Yet we’re about to have another election where more than 90 percent of incumbents are reelected. In fact, the most common reelection rate for House members over the past 30 years is 98 percent. 98 percent reelection—that’s what you expect to see in Russia, not in a democracy. Americans don’t want a permanent ruling class of career politicians. ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 7, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: David Boaz Source Type: blogs

Should Republicans Restore the Judicial Filibuster?
Roger Pilon When Republicans take control of the Senate in January, should they revive the judicial filibuster that Democrats instituted in 2003 when George W. Bush was president, but ended last November when Republicans were filibustering Obama nominees? That heads-I-win-tails-you-lose question probably answers itself, but the background is a bit more complicated. In fact, in a post I rushed into print yesterday morning I mangled some elementary filibuster facts, which I partially corrected late in the day after a reader kindly alerted me to the error. I’m tempted to say that an impostor was writing under my name, but ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 6, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Roger Pilon Source Type: blogs

Can a State Punish You for Advertising Your Business Without a License?
Ilya Shapiro and Gabriel Latner Under Ohio law, it isn’t illegal to buy gold, it isn’t illegal to sell gold, and it isn’t illegal to talk about buying and selling gold. But—and it’s a significant “but”—if you talk about buying gold, you’re not allowed to actually buy any. At least not without a license. That’s right: in Ohio, it’s illegal for anyone who advertises a willingness to buy gold to do so without a license. Obtaining and maintaining that license isn’t easy, or cheap. Licenses must be renewed every year, and license holders have to make daily reports to the poli...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 6, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Ilya Shapiro, Gabriel Latner Source Type: blogs

The Adaptive Response of Salmon to Global Warming
Patrick J. Michaels and Craig D. Idso …the extinction horrors of climate change may be a “fish story” Perhaps the myth-iest chestnut in the scary global warming meme is that our dear earth’s panoply of species is adapted only to the current climatic regime, and changing that regime means certain death, i.e. extinction. That’s an easy, simplistic sell, but it denies some of the subtleties of organismal biology. Four decades ago, scientists realized that evolution has preserved a variety of responses to environmental change. It turns out that our enzymes, the basic material that catalyze life as we know it, actual...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 5, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Patrick J. Michaels, Craig D. Idso Source Type: blogs

The Neocon Moment: Showing Why Foreign Intervention Fails
Doug Bandow With President Barack Obama further tarnishing his Nobel Peace Prize by starting yet another Middle Eastern war, exuberant Neoconservatives claim their moment has arrived. And it has: Neocon claims that war-mongering and nation-building serve America’s interests have become obviously ever more absurd. In 2001 President George W. Bush initiated what was supposed to be The Neocon Moment, projecting a swaggering global presence in which the U.S. would bomb, invade, occupy, and otherwise intervene whenever and for whatever reason it chose. As I wrote for Forbes online:  “Autocrats would flee, candies woul...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 3, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs

Public Oversight of Congress, One Click at a Time
Jim Harper In mid-August, using Cato Deepbills data, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University started alerting visitors to its U.S. Code pages that the laws these visitors care about may be amended by Congress. The most visited bills are an interesting smattering of issues. Getting top clicks is H.R. 570, the American Heroes COLA Act. Would it surprise you to learn that beneficiaries of Social Security’s Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance program are looking to see if veterans’ disability compensation will get the same cost-of-living increases? The relevant section of the Social Security Act ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 3, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Jim Harper Source Type: blogs

What Sort of Problem Is ISIS?
Justin Logan The quality of the discussion about what sort of problem ISIS poses to the United States has been unsurprisingly poor, given who is framing it. All Americans have been appalled by the grotesque killings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff, two American hostages held by the Islamic State. The justness of vengeance against their killers is something everyone agrees on. But beyond that, the debate is stunning by its internal contradictions. Take, for example, the fact that the outgoing director of the National Counterterrorism Center recently announced that while ISIS “poses a direct and significant threat ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - September 9, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Justin Logan Source Type: blogs

Maybe U.S. Should Defend South Korea by Letting it Develop Nuclear Weapons
Doug Bandow U.S. foreign and defense policy long has been brain dead.  ‘Whatever has been must ever be’ seems to be the Pentagon’s mantra.  That’s the typical response to the idea that Washington should bring home its troops and allow South Korea to defend itself. The Republic of Korea has grown up and surged past the North. The ROK should use its abundant wealth and larger population to close the military gap.  Just as most Americans expect those on welfare to get a job to take care of themselves and their families, the ROK should step up and take care of itself. There may be good arguments against...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - August 11, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs

The Export-Import Bank and Its Victims: Which Industries Bear the Brunt
Daniel J. Ikenson The Export-Import Bank of the United States is a government-run export credit agency, which provides access to favorable financing for the foreign customers of some U.S. companies.  For several months, Washington has been embroiled in a debate over whether to reauthorize the Bank’s charter, which will otherwise expire on September 30.  While Republican House leadership remains publicly committed to shutting down the Bank, a bipartisan group of eight senators introduced reauthorization legislation last night, setting the stage for a post-August recess showdown. Reauthorization buffs conten...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 31, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Daniel J. Ikenson Source Type: blogs

Inventions to Eagerly Await
Stephanie Rugolo Humans are progress seekers. Those with an entrepreneurial drive use their intellect to invent novel solutions to our problems. Sometimes, their solutions alleviate widespread suffering and let us live better than kings of centuries past. Thomson Reuters released just such a list of welfare-enhancing inventions to expect by 2025: Dementia, Alzheimer’s, cancer drug-induced deaths, and Type I diabetes should afflict far fewer individuals by 2025. See below that cancer–one of the most common causes of death in several countries–is already on the decline (with a graph made on HumanProgress.org):...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - July 23, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Stephanie Rugolo Source Type: blogs

Private Funding of Science?
Jeffrey Miron According to textbook economics, government funding is crucial to scientific progress and technological innovation.  The reasoning is that pure science (e.g., the structure of DNA) underlies most applied science (e.g., genetic testing).  Pure science, however, is easily copied once discovered, so it cannot earn significant profits. Private actors therefore underinvest in pure science, and applied science suffers. In economics lingo, pure science is a public good because knowledge is non-excludable. This perspective is reasonable but hardly decisive. Government funding suffers bureaucratic inef...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 17, 2014 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Jeffrey Miron Source Type: blogs

New York Times Op-ed on Infrastructure
Chris Edwards My op-ed in today’s New York Times has prompted numerous critical comments on the NYT website. Let me address some of them. Some readers questioned the linked source for my statement that infrastructure spending in the United States is about the same level as in other high-income countries. This fact does need some explanation, but I didn’t have room to include it in the op-ed. The data I cited were emailed to me by the author of the linked OECD report. It is national accounts data on gross fixed investment. I charted the data here in Figure 2. Some readers wondered about my definition of ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 14, 2014 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Chris Edwards Source Type: blogs

The FBI versus the Citizens
Gene Healy This Thursday at Cato, we’re hosting an event for a remarkable new book: Betty Medsger’s The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI (RSVP here). As I explain in the Washington Examiner today, it’s a story as riveting as any heist film, and far more significant:   Forty-three years ago last Saturday, an unlikely band of antiwar activists calling themselves “The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI” broke into a Bureau branch office in Media, Pennsylvania, making off with reams of classified documents. Despite a manhunt involving 20...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - March 11, 2014 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Gene Healy Source Type: blogs