Cato Event Podcast

In November 2012 voters in Colorado and Washington passed landmark measures to legalize the production and sale of cannabis for social use—a first not only in the United States but also the world. Medical cannabis is now legal in 21 states and Washington, D.C., and more than one million Americans have turned to it in place of conventional pharmaceuticals. Public opinion continues to shift to...

Public opinion polls show that, by overwhelming margins, Americans believe that the United States “has a unique character because of its history and Constitution that sets it apart from other nations as the greatest in the world.” However dissatisfied they are with the characters who run it, Americans take great pride in our system of government, with its separation of powers and indep...

Medicaid is already the largest item on many state budgets, and federal spending on the program is expected to increase dramatically in the next decade, putting additional strain on an already overextended national budget as well. As enrollment in the program expands under the Affordable Care Act, policymakers will face challenging decisions in how to best manage the program and its escalating cos...

The president has a constitutional duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Previous administrations have been criticized for overreaching — that is, going beyond what the law expressly authorizes. But the Obama administration has pioneered a new way to shirk this duty: suspension of the law. In numerous areas — including Obamacare implementation, immigration law, educ...

This panel will discuss various economic and developmental aspects of ISDS, debate whether ISDS is a necessary inducement for foreign investors, examine the costs and benefits of ISDS rules to various U.S. entities, and consider whether and how ISDS provisions may be impacting the trade agenda. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The federal regulatory code has become so voluminous that it now bewilders ordinary citizens. The web of rules and regulations is now so vast that people can become ensnared in circumstances where they meant no harm. Even when there is no infraction, it can be financially ruinous to mount a legal defense against powerful agencies that seem bent on coercing a plea deal or settlement. And what about...

Purchase Book Smoking is risky for smokers, but is it bad for the rest of us? Science says no. Those who die from smoking tend to die close to retirement age. Lifetime medical costs for smokers are less than for nonsmokers. The risk to others of secondhand smoke is impossible to measure and is probably negligible. In short, smokers are not a public cost. So why are they over-taxed, dissed, and dis...

President Obama recently declared that “the debate” over the Affordable Care Act “is over.” That may be wishful thinking given that the law continues to be unpopular and its implementation keeps hitting snags. Moreover, lawsuits challenging Obamacare are once again reaching the nation’s highest courts. On May 8, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit will hear arguments in Sissel...

The debate over copyright seems to consist of two irreconcilable poles. One side dismisses copyright as a plaything of political forces, imposing illegitimate restraints on freedom of expression. The opposing side regards copyrights as fundamental property rights that deserve the fullest protection of the law—like rights to houses, cars, and other forms of property. Neither view, however, captures...

The technocratic approach to ending global poverty favored by development experts often strengthens authoritarian governments and neglects or undermines the preferences and personal choices of poor people. William Easterly will explain why a different branch of economics emerged for poor countries and how it has served the interests of decisionmakers in powerful countries, political leaders in poo...

The Italian law scholar Bruno Leoni was a champion of law over legislation. In his classic Freedom and the Law (1961), he presented the case for organic legal systems that adjust to human behavior and against legal systems that attempt to adjust human behavior to fit the needs and desires of the politically powerful. It’s a message still urgently needed today. Please join us for a discussion of Le...

Tumblr sits at the unique intersection between blogging and social media, presenting an unusual challenge for social media managers. What role should Tumblr play in your online marketing strategy? How can you find and engage supporters on the platform and what are some best practices for measuring ROI? Join Tumblr’s Liba Rubenstein for a live-streamed lunchtime presentation, followed by a private...

Soaring tuition and student debt, the rise of high-tech alternatives, and a persistently sluggish economy have provoked a startling question: "Is college worth it?" It's a question that raises many others: Must I go to college to learn skills I'll need for my career? Is just getting a degree — any degree — the key to my future prosperity? Should higher education be about marketable ski...

The advent of wearable tech creates huge new opportunities for liberty advocates to engage in innovative strategies for changing policy. At the same time, the inherently invasive nature of the technology invites a number of serious privacy and legal concerns. Google Glass has particularly stirred up controversy, with several high profile confrontations between users and skeptics making national he...

American higher education is being swept by two potentially irresistible waves of change. The first is intense scrutiny of academia’s costs and benefits, driven by soaring prices, student debt, and the ensuing public anger. The second is the emergence of postsecondary models that threaten to replace traditional colleges and universities on a major scale. In this special forum, we’ll look at the th...

American higher education is being swept by two potentially irresistible waves of change. The first is intense scrutiny of academia’s costs and benefits, driven by soaring prices, student debt, and the ensuing public anger. The second is the emergence of postsecondary models that threaten to replace traditional colleges and universities on a major scale. In this special forum, we’ll look at the th...

In recent years, concerns have been raised about the potential market risks associated with high frequency trading and algorithmic trading in general. Proponents of high frequency trading suggest the practice is a contemporary tool that facilitates informational market efficiency and is capable of being regulated by the market and market participants. Opponents have argued that these practices cre...

From the doctor’s office to the workplace, the federal government is taking on ever more responsibility for managing our lives. At the same time, Americans have never been more disaffected with Washington, seeing it as an intrusive, incompetent, wasteful giant. In this book, lawyer and political scientist Peter Schuck lays out a wide range of examples and an enormous body of evidence to explain wh...

Purchase book One of the most contentious ethical issues surrounding transplantation today is the question of organ selling. Given the shortage of donated organs, should people be able to sell their organs either directly or indirectly? Today, organ selling is illegal in nearly all industrialized countries. One of the few that does allow it is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until recently, that cou...

The immigration reform debate is increasingly polarized and has policymakers looking for new and innovative reform options. State- or regionally managed guest-worker visa programs, in addition to federal visas, should be considered as part of any immigration reform. Under such a system, individual states could manage and experiment with different guest-worker visa systems designed to suit their pa...

Purchase book No country is as misunderstood as North Korea, and no modern tyrant has remained more mysterious than the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il. In his new work, DEAR READER: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il , Michael Malice pulls back the curtain to expose the life story of the "Incarnation of Love and Morality." Taken directly from books spirited out of Pyongyang, DEAR READER is a...

On March 19, 2011, the United States and nineteen allied states launched an air assault against the Libyan military. President Obama and other leaders argued that military action would protect Libyan civilians, aid the progress of democracy there and across the region, and buttress the credibility of the U.N. Security Council, which had passed a resolution demanding a cease fire. By October, local...

The Ticket: The Many Faces of School Choice , is a new documentary film that takes viewers on a whistle-stop tour across the United States, asking: “What is school choice?” As the film illustrates, various forms of choice are proliferating around the country, from charter schools to scholarship tax credits. The film finds one simple premise underlying these different models: parents and children d...

Twitter has certainly come a long way since it first launched in 2006. While it may seem obvious that Twitter deserves a central position in every social media manager's online strategy, the specifics of what those tweets should look like remain hotly debated. Are unsolicited tweets uncouth or par for the course? How many hashtags are too many hashtags? When IS a retweet an endorsement? The latest...

“What do you think of burglarizing an FBI office?” That was the question a mild-mannered physics professor at Haverford College privately asked a few fellow antiwar activists in late 1970. Soon, as part of an unlikely band calling itself “the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI,” he did just that. On March 8, 1971, the group broke into a Bureau branch office outside of Philadelphia, seeking...