Think Tank West

Back in September, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service became a punchline after issuing 3.5 million duck stamps with the wrong phone number. But it wasn’t just any ordinary wrong number.  Unassuming callers who were “lucky” enough to dial it were invited to “talk only to the girls that turn you on” for $1.99 a [...]

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“There’s no logical end to it,” Cato Senior Fellow Gerald P. O’Driscoll Jr. said to Neil Cavuto on Fox Business. He’s talking about the incredible expanding bailouts. It started with Bear Stearns in March and then homebuilders in April. Then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September, and after that the deluge. AIG, announced at [...]

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In late 2000, with the budgeting and spending process in collapse, Congress hurriedly passed a mammoth spending bill called the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2001. It contained a provision preempting state regulation of financial derivatives under gambling or “bucket shop” laws. The result less than a decade later was the out-of-control market for credit default swaps [...]

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Earlier this month I participated in a Fred Friendly Seminar on health care reform for PBS.  The show, hosted and moderated by NYU Law Professor Arthur Miller, premiered on Mississippi and Louisiana public television on October 16, and will be shown on your local PBS station in January.  However, you can watch the show now here.

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This week is the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law on October 28, 1998. I was on last Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast discussing the DMCA’s detrimental effects on high tech innovation, and I’ve got a post at the Freedom to Tinker blog discussing one likely casualty of [...]

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When the weight of big government has me worn down at day’s end I occasionally look at a few politician photo-ops to keep me motivated.  A good source is the Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration (EDA): (See here.) The latest EDA photo-op shows Sen. Harry Reid presenting a goofy oversized check from the U.S. [...]

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Ezra Klein, high priest of the Church of Universal Coverage, kindly concedes the point that government — including Medicare, America’s experiment with universal coverage — tips the scales toward fee-for-service payment rather than prepayment. But in case that scale-tipping actually hurt anybody, he exonerates government and pins the blame on the physicians who got government [...]

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Article: “Shelter From the Storm,” by Steve H. Hanke in Forbes “To find a safe harbor in this storm, we must ignore panicked media headlines and understand how we got into such turbulent waters. There is plenty of blame to go around, but the main culprit is the Federal Reserve.” Op-Ed: “Taking Stock of the [...]

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Cato Director of Health Policy Studies Michael F. Cannon weighs in on the problems with Obama’s health care plan:

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I have received a fair amount of criticism for my recent oped “Universal Coverage Kills,” which appeared at National Review Online and in the Orange County Register: Fun excerpts include: A philosophically sympathetic eICU medical director emails that I am “off the mark.” A “free-market believer and an attorney” emails that he is “upset about [...]

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