Think Tank West

On TPM Cafe, a part of the Talking Points Memo media empire, I’m in a week-long discussion of a new book, The American Way of War: Guided Missiles, Misguided Men and a Republic in Peril, which oddly takes the title of the Russell Weigley classic without acknowledgement. The other participants are the author, Eugene Jarecki, [...]

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It is commonly believed that intellectual property law in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for innovation and the creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies. But Michele Boldrin and his coauthor David K. Levine argue that intellectual property laws are costly and dangerous [...]

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Cato Senior Fellow Daniel J. Mitchell participated in a debate yesterday on NPR.org that discussed the possible implications of a government bailout of the U.S. auto industry. Mitchell argued against it, and in the middle of the debate, NPR held an online poll that showed that 68 percent of listeners agreed with him. Quotes from [...]

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My post yesterday regarding Members of Congress who voted to exempt financial derivatives from state gambling laws created a firestorm of controversy. Well, two people asked me about it, anyway . . . (A new WashingtonWatch.com post on the presidential candidates who didn’t help create our economic problems is available for your perusal, by the [...]

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Is Barack Obama a socialist? That’s the question Cato adjunct scholar Don Boudreaux asks in one of the last paper editions of the Christian Science Monitor. Not really, he concludes. But Anyone who speaks glibly of “spreading the wealth around” sees wealth not as resulting chiefly from individual effort, initiative, and risk-taking, but from great social [...]

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Brookings Institution economist Henry Aaron writes in this week’s New England Journal of Medicine: Unfortunately, the U.S. health care system could not be better structured to frustrate the elimination of waste than if it had been designed to do just that.

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Article: “Nuclear Energy: Risky Business,” by Jerry Taylor in Reason Magazine Nuclear energy is to the Right what solar energy is to the Left: Religious devotion in practice, a wonderful technology in theory, but an economic white elephant in fact (some crossovers on both sides notwithstanding). When the day comes that the electricity from solar [...]

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Over at Economist.com, they’ve just kicked off a debate on the resolution  “that individuals, not the state, should pay for higher education.” On Monday, they will post my “featured guest” statement on the resolution in question, so I can’t give away my exciting conclusions right now. I can, though, give you a hint about one [...]

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The good folks at the Flex Your Rights Foundation have produced a Citizen’s Guide to Refusing DC Metro Searches. A timely response to news that there would be random searches, which is poor counterterrorism.

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The Washington Post’s Walter Pincus reports: Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has taken steps to make it easier for U.S. intelligence agencies to recruit first-generation Americans with foreign relatives. The story, first broken by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, is likely to be overlooked given the focus on the campaign and [...]

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