Inside the Belly of the Beast: A Libertarian Protest

By Dan Mitchell -- November 3, 2014

“The crowd in Washington … benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget…. The incentives to ‘play the game’ are enormous…. Big government is inherently corrupting.”

I sometimes think that working at the Cato Institute and trying to change Washington must be akin to working at a church in the middle of Amsterdam’s red light district.

In both cases, you’re wildly outnumbered by people with a different outlook on life. And it’s not that easy to save misguided souls.

The crowd in Washington, for instance, benefits enormously from a complicated tax system, a Byzantine regulatory regime, and a bloated budget.

All of these factors create big opportunities for unearned income for bureaucrats, cronies, politicians, contractors, lobbyists, and other insiders. Telling those people they should back away from the public trough is not exactly a way to make friends in DC.…

Halloween Thoughts from Obama’s Science Advisor

By Robert Bradley Jr. -- October 31, 2014

“Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the [twentieth] century.”

– John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich[1]

Doom and gloom—and falsity—hallmarks the long career of John P. Holdren, neo-Malthusian and President Obama’s initial and still science advisor. Halloween Holdren has been quiet with the outlandish in recent years–he does not want to embarrass his boss–but his many quotations beginning in the 1970s, never disowned, remain for the record.

Today is a good time to refresh memories of the man who just might be the scariest presidential advisor in U.S. history!

Read—but don’t be frightened. The sky-is-falling gloom of Holdren, his mentor Paul Ehrlich, and others is in intellectual and empirical trouble. From Julian Simon to Bjorn Lomborg to Indur Goklany to Matt Ridley to Marlo Lewis to Alex Epstein, the technological optimists have the upper hand in a debate that continues to rage.…

Milton Friedman: Climate Realist, Not Alarmist (no carbon tax support here)

By Robert Murphy -- October 30, 2014

“Of all my father’s accomplishments, I believe the one he was proudest of was his role in ending military conscription. I do not think he would be happy to be conscripted, posthumously, for someone else’s cause [of climate alarmism].”

– David Friedman, “A Case of Posthumous Conscription,” October 18, 2014.

Bob Inglis, Executive Director of the Energy and Enterprise Initiative based at George Mason University, continues a quest to get conservatives and the Republican interested in a carbon tax. Recently, he chaired a forum at the University of Chicago titled, “What Would Milton Friedman Do About Climate Change?” At the event, two Chicago economists argued that Friedman (1912–2006) would have applied the textbook analysis of “negative externalities” to the issue of climate change, and therefore would have supported a carbon tax.…