Cato Event Podcast

International security in the 21st century is increasingly characterized by the use of cyber operations. Concern over this still-developing domain of competition has led to inflated assessments of its dangers and greater support for a more aggressive U.S. posture on cyber security and cyber warfare. How do great powers like the United States, Russia, and China employ cyber capabilities? What threa...

At any given time, the United States holds almost two million people in prison for felony convictions. Often overlooked, however, are more than 11 million people who cycle in and out of American jails every year for misdemeanor offenses. Despite composing the largest part of our criminal system, misdemeanors don’t usually garner the same policy attention as more overtly draconian features of the s...

Puerto Rico's recovery in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria has reinvigorated debate about a relatively unknown law that has hampered its recovery efforts and bogged down its economy. Since 1920, maritime commerce between Puerto Rico and the rest of the United States has been governed by the Jones Act, a law that mandates that vessels transporting goods domestically be U.S.-crewed, U.S.-flagged, U....

Some political leaders are saying that income and wealth inequality are at unacceptable levels and need to be countered by higher taxes on the wealthy and more transfer payments. But the data used to support those arguments are often misunderstood and omit key elements of the picture. John Early will describe gaps in the official data used in the inequality debate and discuss alternative income me...

Liberalism, a political philosophy that grew out of the Enlightenment and champions reason, freedom, and equality, has lately been criticized by some religious thinkers in the West. Liberalism, in their view, only “atomizes” individuals, weakens society, and ultimately corrodes all faiths. Yet other religious intellectuals think that there are many reasons to appreciate liberalism, including the v...

The disastrous choice to use force to remove Saddam Hussein from power did enormous damage to the wealth, well-being, and reputations of the United States and Great Britain. To this day, the hangover of the Iraq war looms large over the politics of both nations. Yet how each of these “special friends” came to the decision to invade Iraq remains shrouded in mystery and mythology. Until now. On Apri...

The perceived threat of artificial intelligence (AI) to the American workforce and society more broadly has become a common topic of discussion among policymakers, academics, and the wider public. But is AI a threat? And if so, are there appropriate policy solutions? History is replete with examples of disruption caused by past technological advances. Are the lessons from those advances applicable...

Are we running out of resources? That’s been a hotly debated question since the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s book  The Population Bomb  in 1968. The Stanford University biologist warned that population growth would result in the exhaustion of resources and a global catastrophe. University of Maryland economist and Cato Institute’s Senior Fellow Julian Simon, in contrast, argued that hum...

Policymakers on both sides of the aisle have proposed new regimes for small-business beneficial ownership reporting. The aim of such legislation is to eliminate opportunities for money laundering and financial crime. However, the proposals before Congress would place heavy new compliance costs on millions of America’s small businesses while continuing to provide opportunities for bad actors to eng...

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” (Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996).Those 26 words (and not a member of Congress) invented the internet as we know it. These words protect internet platforms from lawsuits based on user-generated content, allow...

Until recently, private social media companies have been free to moderate content on their own platforms. But accusations of political bias have caused some to call for government regulation of the efforts social media companies make to moderate content. Some have even suggested that social media entities ought to be nationalized to ensure they operate in the public interest. Is there a role here...

Over the past two decades, Zimbabwe has been in a state of almost constant crisis. The once-prosperous nation now ranks among the poorest and most repressive countries in the world. Is there a way out of this predicament? Barry D. Wood, who recently traveled to Zimbabwe, will describe the current economic and political situation in the country. Steve H. Hanke will discuss steps that Zimbabwe’s gov...

A quarter century ago, the Cato Institute released a revolutionary book, Patient Power: Solving America's Health Care Crisis , by John C. Goodman and Gerald L. Musgrave. Patient Power introduced the United States to a bold and radical way of thinking about health care. When third parties pay medical bills, Goodman and Musgrave wrote, providers come to view third-party payers as their customers, no...

Please join us on Monday, April 8, for a special discussion of Michael Tanner's newly published book, The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America's Poor . In it, Tanner sets aside the traditional conservative and liberal responses to poverty and explores a fresh approach to this persistent problem. The result is a compelling blend of social justice and limited government. Following Tanne...

Of the myriad policy priorities established by the current administration and congressional leadership, the tackling of skyrocketing prescription drug prices may have the best chance of moving through the legislative process over the next two years. Bipartisan proposals to address rising prescription drug prices have been introduced in both the House and the Senate; President Trump identified the...

What most frightens the average American? Terrorism. North Korea. Iran. But what if none of those are probable or consequential threats to America? What if the world today is safer, freer, wealthier, healthier, and better educated than ever before? What if the real dangers to Americans are noncommunicable diseases, gun violence, drug overdoses—even hospital infections? In this compelling loo...

In recent years, libertarians and progressives have found common cause in their concern that the growth of executive power is far in excess of constitutional limits. Our Constitution gives the president few explicit emergency powers, but presidents have invoked national emergencies as justification for a wide variety of actions. After Watergate, Congress created a framework for regulating this aut...

The U.S. government’s current strategy of trying to restrict the supply of opioids for nonmedical uses is not working. While government efforts to reduce the supply has reduced both the amount of legally manufactured prescription opioids and the number of opioid prescriptions, deaths from opioid-related overdoses are nevertheless accelerating. Research shows that the increase is due, in large part...

The U.S. government’s current strategy of trying to restrict the supply of opioids for nonmedical uses is not working. While government efforts to reduce the supply has reduced both the amount of legally manufactured prescription opioids and the number of opioid prescriptions, deaths from opioid-related overdoses are nevertheless accelerating. Research shows that the increase is due, in large part...

The U.S. government’s current strategy of trying to restrict the supply of opioids for nonmedical uses is not working. While government efforts to reduce the supply has reduced both the amount of legally manufactured prescription opioids and the number of opioid prescriptions, deaths from opioid-related overdoses are nevertheless accelerating. Research shows that the increase is due, in large part...

The U.S. government’s current strategy of trying to restrict the supply of opioids for nonmedical uses is not working. While government efforts to reduce the supply has reduced both the amount of legally manufactured prescription opioids and the number of opioid prescriptions, deaths from opioid-related overdoses are nevertheless accelerating. Research shows that the increase is due, in large part...

The U.S. government’s current strategy of trying to restrict the supply of opioids for nonmedical uses is not working. While government efforts to reduce the supply has reduced both the amount of legally manufactured prescription opioids and the number of opioid prescriptions, deaths from opioid-related overdoses are nevertheless accelerating. Research shows that the increase is due, in large part...

Justice John Paul Stevens’s majority opinion in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) has become among the most hotly debated topics in legal circles. The “Chevron Doctrine,” which says that courts should defer to the interpretations of executive agencies on ambiguous statutes, divides scholars across ideological lines. Chevron’s growth from a “puny litt...

The first few generations of American leaders made a sharp distinction between advancing the legitimate interests of the republic and taking on foreign causes that purported to overthrow tyrannical rule and establish democratic systems based on respect for fundamental rights. Within the last half-century, however, a number of foreign insurgent groups have been able to manipulate U.S. policymakers...

“Mass incarceration” has been a ubiquitous term in criminal justice circles because of the extraordinary number of people behind bars in the United States. Many partial solutions have been implemented on the state and federal levels, mostly concerned with sentence length and re-entry services for nonviolent offenders. Those changes have been improvements, for the most part, and have been life chan...