Think Tank West

According to the New York Times, Sen. John McCain stepped up his criticism of the Bush administration by pounding the lectern and demanding that the government support his plan to buy troubled mortgages from homeowners. “And why isn’t the Treasury secretary ordering them to do that?” Mr. McCain asked. And then he went on: “We [...]

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Article: “Mark-To-Model, Into The Twilight Zone,” by Steve H. Hanke and John A. Tatom in Investor’s Business Daily Daily Podcast: “Rail Versus Gas,” featuring Randal O’Toole on Cato.org Article: “Questionable Deals in a Volatile Region,” by Malou Innocent and Christopher Preble in The South China Morning Post Radio Highlight: Robert A. Levy discusses the constitutionality of [...]

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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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