Think Tank West

By Jagadeesh Gokhale My latest book Social Security: A Fresh Look at Reform Alternatives (available here) argues that it’s not just labor quantity — the number of employees who are accruing future Social Security benefits — that will determine the size of Social Security’s future imbalances (and, incidentally, those of Medicare, and the size of [...]

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By Michael F. Cannon With multiple lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare’s “individual mandate,” the law’s backers have proffered two principal arguments in its defense.  First, they claim that Congress has the power to require U.S. residents to purchase health insurance under the Constitution’s grant of power “to regulate Commerce…among the several States.”  Second, they [...]

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By Julian Sanchez The 2009 Wiretap Report has just been released by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. The headline findings: 2,376 wiretaps were authorized for criminal investigations last year, of which 663 were federal and 1,713 were issued at the state level. (NB: These numbers don’t include Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretaps, “pen [...]

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By Tad DeHaven Over at Downsizing Government, we focused on the following issues this week: The only way to get rid of the fraud and abuse at HUD is to dismantle it and get the federal government out of the housing business altogether. Instead of wasting more taxpayer money on a nationwide system of intercity [...]

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By Indur Goklany Why does the Neo-Malthusians’ dystopian worldview — that human and environmental well-being will suffer with increases in population, affluence and technological change — fail the reality check? Why has human well-being improved in the Age of Industrialization despite order-of-magnitude increases in the consumption of materials, fossil fuel energy and chemicals? I offer [...]

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By Jim Harper If someone asked you what’s wrong with a planned economy, your first answer might not be “privacy.” But it should be. For proof, look no further than the financial regulation bill the Senate is debating. Its 1,400 pages contain strong prescriptions for a government-micromanaged economy—and the undoing of your financial privacy. Here’s [...]

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By Cato Editors A free-market ‘5-year plan’ to boost U.S. exports. Randy Barnett on the government mandate to buy health insurance: “First Congress said it was a regulation of commerce. Now it’s supposed to be a tax. Neither claim will survive Supreme Court scrutiny.“ Under Obama’s budget, debt held by the public would grow from [...]

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By Gene Healy That’s what my colleague Tim Lynch’s 2009 volume In the Name of Justice is, according to a glowing review in the new edition of the Loyola Law Review. Tim’s  probably too modest to link it himself, so I’ll do that here. In the review, Professor Laurie L. Levenson of Loyola Law School writes: I have been [...]

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By Daniel Griswold The latest catch phrase in the immigration debate is that we must “get control of our borders” before we consider actually changing the current immigration law that has made enforcement so difficult in the first place. In his Washington Post column yesterday, George Will wrote that “the government’s refusal to control [the [...]

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By Daniel Griswold The latest catch phrase in the immigration debate is that we must “get control of our borders” before we consider actually changing the current immigration law that has made enforcement so difficult in the first place. In his Washington Post column yesterday, George Will wrote that “the government’s refusal to control [the [...]

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