Think Tank West

A couple of people have asked me about a comment David Rivkin made at Cato’s recent conference on the first anniversary of ObamaCare. Rivkin is representing the 26 states suing to overturn ObamaCare in Florida v. HHS, the case in which a federal judge declared ObamaCare unconstitutional and void. In his most recent ruling in that [...]

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Civil asset forfeiture strikes at the heart of property rights. Authorities simply seize property property without all the messiness of convicting someone of a crime. It’s blatantly unconstitutional and it shouldn’t happen, but it does. What’s worse, many state governments offer little to no information to the public about what they’re doing with those ill-gotten [...]

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Please join us on Thursday, April 7 at 2:00 p.m. ET for “The Economic Impact of Government Spending,” featuring Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX), former Sen. Phil Gramm, former IMF director of fiscal affairs department Vito Tanzi, and Ohio University economist and AEI adjunct scholar Richard Vedder. We [...]

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Last month I wrote a post on President Obama’s selective citation of evidence when debating which education programs to kill and which to keep. Well yesterday the administration struck again, issuing the following statement opposing a bill that would revive DC’s bleeding-out voucher program: STATEMENT OF ADMINISTRATION POLICY H.R. 471 – Scholarships for Opportunity and Results [...]

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Last year the House Republican leadership created the GOP’s “YouCut” website, which offers several possible spending cuts for citizens to vote on. The cut with the most votes goes to the House floor for an up-or-down vote. It’s a decent idea, but unfortunately, most of the cuts the GOP have offered thus far only amount [...]

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Kids represent special cases in the libertarian commitment to individual liberty, and for a good reason. They are, it is generally thought, not necessarily able to know what is best for them. The solution is to leave child-rearing to the parents, but what do we do about parents who are abusive or negligent? Lots of room for [...]

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According to news reports, Democrats and Republicans are unlikely to reach any sort of budget agreement before April 8, when a short-term spending bill for the current fiscal year expires. Barring some new development, this could mean a shutdown of the non-essential parts of the government. This makes both sides very nervous. Democrats don’t want [...]

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Randy May of the Free State Foundation has a characteristically good post about the AT&T/T-Mobile merger entitled: “The AT&T and T-Mobile Merger: Thinking Things Through.” Among other smart ideas, Randy highlights the competitive game-playing that goes on in the merger review arena: When considering competitive and market impacts for purposes of merger reviews, observe the [...]

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Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation has a good post today dissecting Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s recent press release on DC school vouchers. If anything, Burke goes a little easy on Rep. Pelosi, comparing the maximum value of the vouchers  ($7,500) with the published figure for DC public school spending ($17,600). As it happens, the public [...]

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Back in February, more than 100 House members introduced a bill that would make it easier to slap duties on imports from China. I explain why picking a trade fight with China would be a bad idea all around in an article just published in the print edition of National Review magazine. Titled “Deal with [...]

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