Think Tank West

William F. Buckley famously said he’d “rather be ruled by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than the faculty at Harvard University.” There’s surely something to that, though the worst president in American history was a Princeton man. Here’s an interesting graph comparing presidential success with presidential IQ. (Explanation here.) (Hat tip: Marian Tupy.) [...]

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For nearly eight years, Republicans either looked the other way (or greedily joined in) as the Bush administration increased the size, cost, and intrusiveness of government. The largest increase in domestic discretionary spending since the Great Society, a massive new entitlement program, greater federal control over education — big-government conservatism was on the march with barely a squeak [...]

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South Carolina governor Mark Sanford, who spoke last Saturday night to our Cato Club 200 retreat, has a great column in the Washington Post today on the federal government’s accelerating tendency to respond to every crisis with an expansion of its powers. He writes: An ever-expanding scope of federal commitment and power is not what [...]

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The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — housed at the U.S. Dept. of Commerce because Dick Nixon wasn’t getting along with his own Secretary of the Interior — has determined that the decline in the harvest of Chesapeake Bay blue crabs is a “commercial fishery failure.”  With that declaration by the “stewards” of the [...]

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The Department of Homeland Security’s Directorate of Science and Technology is “developing a system designed to detect ‘hostile thoughts’ in people walking through border posts, airports and public places.” DHS says that it works. Fox News’ security columnist is excited. Feel safer?

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When I started reading AEI director of education policy studies Rick Hess’s latest article, I feared a Stern-esque public defection. “Oh no,” I thought. “He’s about to denounce school choice as a failure without any consideration for what it needs to work.” Then came the pleasant surprise: Hess makes clear that school choice hasn’t produced transformative competition and innovation [...]

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In the Washington Post this morning: Bailout Raises Libertarians’ Market Value: Cato Institute’s Scholars Pained and Pumped By Government Action [F]aced with a proposed $700 billion government bailout of  Wall Street, this town’s most gung-ho libertarians and free-marketeers are reaching for their coffee and their keyboards. They are invigorated. The prospect of doom and ruination [...]

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For the second time in six years, the Bush administration has asked Congress for nearly unlimited authority without an independent professional review of the evidence that led the administration to request such authority. In making the case for the Iraq war resolution, according to Senator John D. Rockefeller, “the administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact [...]

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A new compilation of Cato scholars’ media appearances from the past year.

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Thought people might be interested in a conversation I had yesterday with Norm Leahy of Tertium Quids, a free market issue-advocacy organization in Virginia, about school choice in that state and across the country. More states are waking up to tax credits as the best bet for school choice; an education reform that saves kids, [...]

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