Although it has been studied intensely by political scientists, the relationship between public opinion and U.S. foreign policy remains murky. Today, pundits argue about whether an "Iraq syndrome" among the public is inhibiting the Obama administration from going to war with Syria. Public anxiety about the debt and deficit has led to increased support for cutting military spending. In this context, a growing number of scholars and academics are calling for Washington to adopt a grand strategy of...
Jul 11, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Purchase book Why do millions of people continue to risk their lives, sometimes losing them, in the pursuit of a chance to establish themselves in a foreign land? Alvaro Vargas Llosa will describe who immigrants are and why they move, and he will compare the immigrant experience today to that of previous eras, identifying far more similarities than differences. By reviewing such topics as religion, education, entrepreneurial spirit, and attitudes toward the receiving society, Mr. Vargas Llosa wi...
Jun 21, 2013•1 hr 20 min
The rise of the West can be understood only as a result of an ideological change that occurred in England in the 17th century and of the emergence of a “bourgeois deal” through which entrepreneurs were let free to engage in innovation and creative destruction, so argues Deirdre McCloskey in her forthcoming book, The Treasured Bourgeoisie: How Markets and Innovation Became Ethical, 1600-1848, and Then Suspect . Please join us for a discussion that will link culture, ethics and rhetoric with entre...
Jun 20, 2013•1 hr 18 min
Congress needs to reauthorize the federal gas tax and decide how to spend federal surface transportation dollars in 2014. Unfortunately, argues Cato’s Randal O’Toole, too much spending in the past has gone to obsolete transportation technologies. Author Scott Beyer argues that the federal government’s role in funding infrastructure has stripped both money and decision-making power from localities, particularly major cities. Emily Goff, of the Heritage Foundation, will present ways reauthorizatio...
Jun 19, 2013•52 min
The Social Security disability program has seen a significant increase in costs and enrollment in recent years. The Trustees project that the program will be insolvent as early as 2016. This recent growth and the program’s looming insolvency have brought it increased attention and added urgency to calls for solutions. Cato senior fellow Jagadeesh Gokhale, Social Security Administration chief actuary Stephen Goss and leading scholars David Autor from MIT and Harold Pollack from the University of ...
Jun 19, 2013•1 hr 40 min
Purchase Book The greatest reduction in mass poverty in human history has occurred during the current era of globalization. The world’s poor are now catching up with the rich at a rapid pace in terms of human well-being. Deepak Lal will discuss how, despite those achievements, confusion about poor countries abounds: the World Bank exaggerates the extent of poverty; the benefits of new development fads including microfinance or randomized testing of projects, are vastly oversold; and discredited ...
Jun 18, 2013•1 hr 6 min
While many members of Congress claim to support free trade, Cato’s congressional trade votes database tells a different story. Rather than simply noting support or opposition to trade liberalization, Cato’s Free Trade, Free Markets methodology distinguishes between trade barriers and trade subsidies. As a result, the database allows researchers to evaluate members of Congress more precisely. In particular, voting patterns during the 112th Congress shed light on the relative importance of ideolog...
Jun 18, 2013•23 min
In Halbig v. Sebelius , four individual taxpayers and three employers are challenging a seemingly obscure IRS decree. The IRS claims the authority to issue hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to health-insurance companies, and to impose penalties on individual taxpayers and employers, in the 33 states that have refused to establish a health insurance "exchange" under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The Halbig plaintiffs assert this decree would penalize them in v...
Jun 17, 2013•1 hr 18 min
In 1920, in Missouri v. Holland , the Supreme Court seemed to say, contrary to basic constitutional principles, that a treaty could increase the legislative power of Congress. That issue is now back before the Court in Bond v. United States , a case with deliciously lurid facts involving adultery, revenge, and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Cato has filed an amicus brief in the case, written by Nicholas Rosenkranz, based on his Harvard Law Review article on the subject. Please join us for a di...
Jun 14, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Purchase book Clint Bolick argues in his new book, written with Jeb Bush, that the three broad components of immigration reform—better immigration enforcement, a lawful pathway for future migrants, and the legalization of current unauthorized immigrants—must work together to produce a viable immigration policy. The 1986 Reagan amnesty failed because it was a partial reform that increased immigration enforcement but did not increase legal opportunities for lower skilled immigrants. The 2007 immig...
Jun 12, 2013•1 hr 14 min
Purchase book "India grows at night while the government sleeps" is an Indian expression referring to the country's impressive economic rise despite the presence of a large, burdensome state. Gurcharan Das will explain how India's story of private success and public failure is not sustainable and that the country's recent growth slowdown signals the need for a strong liberal state that would ensure accountability, perform limited and well-defined functions, and base itself on the rule of law. Sw...
Jun 11, 2013•1 hr 20 min
The Constitution gives the federal government no authority to govern education, and numerous laws prohibit Washington from influencing school curricula. How has the federal government gotten around these barriers? Primarily by attaching demands to federal money, which is exactly what it did to get states to adopt the supposedly “state-led" and "voluntary" Common Core curriculum standards. This unprecedented drive to national uniformity is dangerous for many reasons, not the least of which is tha...
Jun 11, 2013•46 min
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Jun 07, 2013•1 hr 30 min
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Jun 07, 2013•1 hr 21 min
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Jun 07, 2013•1 hr 28 min
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Jun 06, 2013•1 hr 36 min
Top officials in the U.S. government, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Union blame Europe’s ills on fiscal austerity and advise Europeans to pursue stimulus spending or delay spending cuts. Simeon Djankov and Anders Aslund will show how the evidence counters that prevailing view. Countries that have reined in their spending are growing briskly while the profligate founder. Aslund will discuss why the level of debt and access to international markets still matter to responsible f...
Jun 05, 2013•1 hr 29 min
Purchase book A common argument for intervening abroad is to alleviate potential or existing human suffering. Repeatedly, however, state-led humanitarian efforts have failed miserably. Why do well-funded, expertly staffed, and well-intentioned humanitarian actions often fall short of achieving their desired outcomes, leaving some of the people they intended to help worse off? Why are well-meaning countries unable to replicate individual instances of success consistently across cases of human suf...
Jun 05, 2013•1 hr 27 min
Despite increasing population, global food production per capita is at all-time highs, even as the amount of agricultural land is reaching new lows. The prime driver has been technology, beginning with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, when Norman Borlaug discovered the key to high-yielding wheat. Since then, "slow" genetics has been replaced by DNA-splicing, giving rise to fears of genetic "mistakes" damaging the world food supply or resulting in inadvertent harm to consumers. Jon Entine and K...
Jun 04, 2013•1 hr 41 min
Five years ago, the Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in District of Columbia v. Heller . By a 5-4 vote, the Court ruled that the strict gun-control laws in the nation’s capital—which amounted to a complete ban on any usable weapon for self-protection, even in the home—were unconstitutional. The Court finally confronted a long-simmering controversy over the scope of the Second Amendment and declared that, yes, that amendment does secure an individual the right to keep and bear arms. Now...
Jun 04, 2013•1 hr 21 min
Congress may pass a major farm bill re- authorization this year for the first time since 2008. Farm bill supporters claim that draft bills in the House and Senate would save taxpayers billions of dollars, but that isn't the case. The bills would eliminate so-called direct payments to farmers, but the savings would be plowed into new subsidy programs and higher guaranteed prices for certain crops. What can be done to reform costly farm subsidies that harm agricultural markets and damage the envir...
May 30, 2013•49 min
Purchase book In his new book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to Be Awesome , Kevin D. Williamson examines the crisis of the modern welfare state and demonstrates that the crucial political failures of our time, from education to health care, are the direct result of government monopolies providing and regulating these services. Entitlement programs have promised far more than they can deliver, and slow moving bureaucracies have stifled innovation and efficiency in attempts to deliver on these f...
May 23, 2013•1 hr 20 min
Trust and reputation are central to the operation of capital markets. But in our generation, reputational mechanisms are failing; and when they fail, markets and societies are also at risk of failure. The usual response has been to call for more aggressive regulation, yet this only worsens the problem, as Jonathan Macey shows in his new book. There, he demonstrates how and why poorly considered regulation has undermined traditional trust mechanisms throughout financial institutions, credit ratin...
May 22, 2013•1 hr 27 min
As the United States continues its use of drone technology overseas, the potential for increased domestic drone use has also begun to raise serious concerns. Sen. Rand Paul's (R-KY) recent filibuster on the topic brought widespread public attention to the issue and lawmakers are now beginning to ask important questions; namely, is use of this technology for surveillance appropriate and, if so, what risks will a drone program pose to civil liberties and individual privacy? What are the appropriat...
May 17, 2013•54 min
A century after the creation of the Federal Reserve and two generations after Congress gave the Fed a dual mandate for price stability and full employment, the Fed's extraordinary actions since 2008 have raised questions about the appropriate role for the Fed and the monetary policy that the Fed should pursue to ensure a strong U.S. economy throughout the 21st century. Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), chairman of Congress's Joint Economic Committee, is at the forefront of this debate. He will be discuss...
May 16, 2013•38 min
Join us for a non-technical primer on risk and cost-benefit analysis with applications to policies ranging from homeland security to climate change. Our panel will consider key issues as probability neglect, cost neglect, and acceptable risk. In general, the place to begin is not with the perennial question, “Are we safer?” but rather with the rarely asked, “How safe are we?” Increases in domestic homeland security spending since 9/11 exceed $1 trillion. How many post-9/11 security programs redu...
May 03, 2013•47 min
The OPEC cartel has been the key actor in world crude oil markets for four decades and counting. Even so, there is a surprising amount of disagreement about the nature of OPEC’s influence on oil markets. In a new study published by Securing America’s Future Energy (SAFE), authors Andrew Morriss and Roger Meiners survey the academic literature and conclude that OPEC is an unstable cartel that has, at times, been effective in significantly increasing the price of oil. When the cartel has failed in...
Apr 25, 2013•1 hr 22 min
This book reviews nine Supreme Court cases and decisions that dealt with monetary laws, together with a summary history of monetary events and policies — notably, the gold standard and the Federal Reserve System — as they were affected by the Court’s decisions. Several cases and decisions had notable consequences for the monetary history of the United States, and some were blatant misjudgements stimulated by political pressures. The cases included in this book begin with McCulloch v. Maryland (1...
Apr 24, 2013•1 hr 24 min
How does the Gang of Eight immigration bill reform guest worker visas? How will those reforms affect the rest of the immigration system? How else can guest worker visas be tweaked to improve the outcomes? These vital questions must be answered so that the guest worker visa program provides the maximum benefit to the American economy. A robust and large guest worker visa program will accomplish two goals. First, it will channel healthy and peaceful people into sectors of the U.S. economy that dem...
Apr 24, 2013•47 min
With what appears to be a never-ending fiscal crisis in Europe, it would be tempting to conclude that every country in Europe is at the risk of impending failure. Such a conclusion would be false. In the middle of Europe lies one country, Switzerland, where moderate taxes and regulation have not strangled innovation. R. James Breiding, author of Swiss Made: The Untold Story behind Switzerland’s Success , will describe the institutions and characteristics that have made the Swiss economy a succes...
Apr 23, 2013•1 hr 2 min
