Cato Removes the Words "Peace," "Free Markets" and "Individual Liberty" From Its Front Page
Here’s the old header:
Here’s the new design:It should also be noted that the words are replaced on the front page by these research “areas” which beltarian technocrats love to chat about during wine and cheese tastings.
Escaping Obama’s Better War (Malou Innocent) (by catoinstitutevideo)
http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/escaping-obamas-better-war
http://www.cato.org/people/malou-innocent
President Obama called Afghanistan “the good war.” Now some lawmakers want to exit as quickly as possible. Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, offers her thoughts on Afghanistan after eleven years, hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives over a country that has rarely ever been stable, secure or prosperous.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg.
States Should Flatly Reject ObamaCare Exchanges (by catoinstitutevideo)
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http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-obamacare-exchanges
Here are just a few reasons why states should refuse to create ObamaCare Exchanges.
Jobs. Refusing to create an exchange will block Obamacare from imposing a tax on employers whose health benefits do not meet the federal government’s definition of “essential” coverage. That tax can run as high as $3,000 per employee. A state that refuses to create an exchange will spare its employers from that tax, and will therefore enable them to create more jobs.
Religious freedom. In blocking that employer tax, state officials would likewise block Obamacare’s effort to force religious employers to provide coverage for services they find immoral — like contraception, pharmaceutical abortions, and sterilization.
The federal debt. Refusing to create exchanges would also reduce the federal debt, because it would prevent the Obama administration from doling out billions of dollars in subsidies to private insurance companies.
The U.S. Constitution. The Obama administration has indicated that it might try to tax employers and hand out those subsidies anyway — even in states that don’t create an exchange, and even though neither Obamacare nor any other federal law gives it the power to do so. If that happens, the fact that a state has refused to create an exchange would give every large employer in the state — including the state government itself — the ability to go to court to block the administration’s attempt to usurp Congress’s legislative powers.
A lower state tax burden. States that opt to create an exchange can expect to pay anywhere from $10 million to $100 million per year to run it. But if states refuse, Obamacare says the federal government must pay to create one. Why should states pay for something that the federal government is giving away?
Bye-bye, Obamacare. That is, if the feds can create an exchange at all. The Obama administration has admitted it doesn’t have the money — and good luck getting any such funding through the GOP-controlled House. Moreover, without state-run exchanges, the feds can’t subsidize private insurance companies. That by itself could cause Obamacare to collapse.
Michael F. Cannon is the director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute. Video Produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg.
Battle for the Cato Institute
The Koch brothers are suing the Cato Institute in order to gain more control over the governance of the Cato Institute (Source). Because of laws in Kansas, where the Cato Institute is incorporated, the organization is controlled by the shareholders who each own 25 percent of the shares and appoint members of the board.
Charles and David Koch own 50 percent of the stock and are thus able to appoint half of the board members of the Cato Institute. The death of another shareholder - William Niskanen - has lead to his conflict, because his shares were transferred to his widow, which the Koch brothers contend is not allowed because the shares should have been offered for the other shareholders to purchase (Source).
Ed Crane, Cato Institute President, has referred to the lawsuit has a hostile takeover and alleges that the Koch brothers want to turn the institute into another partisan organization like Americans for Prosperity.
Even as someone who is not a libertarian, this interests me. I think the Cato Institute does reputable work on the policy front even if I don’t agree with all of it, because they provide serious, informed critiques of policies from a libertarian perspective, and I would not want to see it turn into another Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, etc.
(via rigatonideology)
State of the Union 2012 (by catoinstitutevideo)
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.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Lester Romero.
CATO Institute scholars debunk the SOTU
State of the Union 2012 (by catoinstitutevideo)
(via nomosshere)
A Unanimous Privacy Victory in U.S. v. Jones (Jim Harper and Julian Sanchez) (by catoinstitutevideo)
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/u-s-v-jones-a-big-privacy-win/
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/jonesing-for-a-fourth-amendment-upgrade/
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13734
In U.S. v. Jones, the Supreme Court has held that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle and then using the device to monitor the vehicle’s movements constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. What does this case mean for broader privacy protections under the Fourth Amendment? The Cato Institute’s Jim Harper and Julian Sanchez assess the ruling.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg.
Evaluating Congress’s Response to Online Piracy (Julian Sanchez) (by catoinstitutevideo)
http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=8841
Cato Institute research fellow Julian Sanchez discusses the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act on Capitol Hill.
Romney still believes in RomneyCare…and that’s the problem
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Romney still believes in RomneyCare…and that’s the problem
One can not believe in big government and the free market at the same time.
Romney is just another big government hack.
How can anyone trust Romney to repeal ObamaCare when his plan is the model for it?
Then there is the Romney line that the people in his state like Romneycare. Well, why shouldn’t they, at least for a time? The program schemed to exploit Medicaid’s byzantine rules in order to shift hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from the rest of the country to Massachusetts. This was not a case of a state going its own way; it was a redistribution of wealth by which Massachusetts got Americans across the country to pay its obligations. And those obligations are metastasizing: Romneycare has driven up medical costs, driven up premiums, and increased taxes on all Americans as well as on citizens of the Bay State. As the Cato Institute (among others) points out, Romney’s claim not to have raised state taxes is false, although most of the rise occurred after he left office — but only because of his unrealistic cost projections,
Obamacare is the issue that inspires the conservative base. Republicans simply must have the base’s enthusiastic support if they are to beat a lavishly funded incumbent who will pull no punches, none, in striving to keep his job. There is no serious person who doubts that Romneycare was the building block for Obamacare: The experts who helped design the former were consulted in the creation of the latter. Yet Romney continues to insist that Romneycare is a smashing success, one he suggests he’d do again without hesitation.
Of course he now says he’d fight to repeal Obamacare, but is Romney really the best candidate to be making that fight? How convincing will he be in decrying wealth redistribution, runaway government spending, and freedom-killing government mandates while he continues championing an overbearing state program that stands as a monument to all those things?
I keep hoping to hear those three words: “I was wrong.” But they’re not coming. Romney supporters on the right keep rationalizing that he is just doing what he must do to stay viable: resisting a colossal flip-flop that would be more damaging than all the others. The candidate, however, says no, and attests that he is defending Romneycare because he believes in it. I usually worry that politicians lie. I’m worried that this one is telling the truth.
U.S. Monetary Policy in 2012 (Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX))
U.S. Rep. Ron Paul has been a critic of American monetary policy. He argues that the days of the “dollar reserve” are over and the United States should quickly move to sound money and dramatically smaller federal budgets. Rep. Paul spoke at the Cato Institute’s 29th Annual Monetary Conference held November 16, 2011.
Via - Catoinstitutevideo
Vladimir Bukovsky: The Power of Memory and Acknowledgement - Cato Institute Distinguished Lecture.
The Power of Memory and Acknowledgement
DISTINGUISHED LECTURE
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
6:00 PM
Featuring Vladimir Bukovsky, Author and former Soviet political dissident.
The Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, renowned Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky will reflect on the need for Russia to acknowledge the criminal nature of its communist past. The way in which the crimes of communism are remembered contrasts with the way in which Nazism was legally judged and more fundamentally condemned and reviled. The failure to pass an equivalent measure of moral judgment on communism has affected subsequent social and political developments in Russia and assured that dangerous characteristics of the communist system live on. Please join us as one of the world’s foremost advocates of human rights explains the evolution of attitudes toward communism since its collapse.
No Child Left Behind: A Decade of Failure.
The No Child Left Behind Act was meant to compel states to adopt high standards and rapidly improve K-12 education in public schools. It is now clear that NCLB has been a failure and has set the stage for even greater federal control over curriculum. The solution, contrary to what many advocates claim, is to get the federal government out of America’s classrooms. Neal McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, comments on NCLB’s decade of failure.
Video produced by Caleb O. Brown and Austin Bragg.
imabusinesman asked: Hey man, I am a big-time libertarian/anarcho-capitalist. I think I am driving my friends crazy on facebook so I figured I’d find a bunch of other putlets to blog on that aren’t liberal internet troll-caves. What do you think about the newsletter thing being pawned off onto Lew Rockwell by Reason in 07/08 (if you think it was Lew)?
I don’t think it was Lew Rockwell who wrote the newsletters. In critiquing that specific article, it’s important to note that one of the authors’ sources is Eric Dondero (which should tell you something about their research integrity). I explained yesterday that Dondero has been trying to cause trouble ever since he got fired from Ron Paul’s campaign for performance issues and subsequently failed in trying to steal Ron Paul’s congressional seat.
There’s been a long-standing ideological tension between the Mises Institute circle (i.e. Lew Rockwell) and the Koch circle (i.e. Cato, Reason)—David Gordon wrote about this in detail—so I’d take everything each group says about one another with a grain of salt.
Whether Lew knew about the content in the newsletters is a different question. I wasn’t alive when the entire thing was going on so I can’t give you a first-hand account of the campaign’s intent, but I’ve heard it was a quasi-populist attempt at attracting new individuals to the movement. I’m positive that he doesn’t really believe the incendiary comments in the newsletters, though. His website (along with the Mises Institute) promotes individual liberty above anything else.
Title:
Penn Jillette on Capitalism, Magic and Morality.
Source:
Uploaded by catoinstitutevideo on Oct 5, 2011
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Hear the full interview: http://www.cato.org/multimedia/daily-podcast/lying-service-truth
Penn Jillette, H.L. Mencken research fellow at the Cato Institute, is the louder, bigger half of the magic/comedy team Penn & Teller. He and Teller co-host a series on Showtime that looks to debunk junk science, scares and scams with reason and logic.
Interview by Caleb O. Brown. Video produced by Caleb O. Brown, Austin Bragg and Evan Banks.
