Cato Institute Timeline, 1977-2002

1977

Cato Institute is founded by Edward H. Crane and Charles G. Koch in San Francisco.

Cato begins publishing Inquiry magazine.

1978

Cato holds its first Summer Seminar in Political Economy. Among the speakers are Murray Rothbard, Roy Childs, Leonard Liggio, Ralph Raico, and Walter Grinder.

Cato launches "Byline," its daily public affairs radio program. The program is broadcast in more than 260 cities, including most of the nation’s largest markets.

1979

Cato publishes two classic manuscripts by Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek: A Tiger by the Tail: The Keynesian Legacy of Inflation and Unemployment and Monetary Policy: Government as Generator of the "Business Cycle."

Cato publishes its first issue of Policy Report. In that inaugural issue is Carolyn Weaver’s article, "Social Security: Has the Crisis Passed?," in which she argues that privatization of the system should be considered.

1980

First issue of Policy Analysis takes on corporate welfare—the Chrysler bail-out.

Cato publishes Peter Ferrara’s 500-page Social Security: The Inherent Contradiction, which makes the case for privatization.

Cato publishes John Goodman’s The Regulation of Medical Care: Is the Price Too High?, in which he chronicles the damaging effects of medical licensing and regulation.

1981

Cato publishes the first issue of the Cato Journal. Among the contributors to that inaugural issue are Arthur Ekirch, D. N. McCloskey, and Arthur Laffer.

Cato publishes Policy Analysis no. 1, "Can Conscription Work?" by Roger Nils Folsom.

1982

Cato moves to the Watterston House on Capitol Hill.

Cato publishes Solidarnosc z Wolnoscia [Solidarity with Liberty], which contains essays by F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Polanyi, and others, and smuggles it into Poland. The Polish embassy tells CNN that such a project is "insane."

Cato publishes Joe Stilwell’s Policy Analysis, "The Savings and Loan Industry: Averting Collapse," in which he argues that through regulation and subsidy, government has caused large distortions in the financial markets and as a result numerous savings and loans will be unable to meet their financial obligations.

Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek is Cato's first distinguished lecturer.

1983

Cato hosts its first annual monetary conference, "The Search for Stable Money." Among the participants are James Buchanan, Fritz Machlup, Karl Brunner, Allan Meltzer, Anna Schwartz, Gottfried Haberler, and Leland Yeager.

1984

In Beyond Liberal and Conservative: Reassessing the Political Spectrum, William S. Maddox and Stuart A. Lilie examine survey data and conclude that the public cannot be divided into only two ideological camps: liberal and conservative. In fact, a sizable portion of the public hold views that would be characterized as libertarian.

Cato hosts a well-attended conference titled "Economic Liberties and the Judiciary." At the conference future Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and University of Chicago professor Richard Epstein spar over the issue of economic freedom, with Epstein urging Scalia and other judges "to take more seriously, or at least more energetically, the role the Constitution assigns you" in protecting economic freedom.

1985

William A. Niskanen, formerly of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers, becomes chairman of the Cato Institute’s Board of Directors.

Cato publishes Social Security: Prospects for Real Reform, edited by Peter Ferrara.

In National Economic Planning: What Is Left?, Don Lavoie argues that centrally planned economies are inherently unstable, thus foreshadowing the demise of communism throughout Central and Eastern Europe.

Along with 10 other organizations, Cato publishes Julian Simon’s lengthy study, "How Do Immigrants Affect Us Economically?," which debunks many of the arguments made by opponents of liberal immigration policies.

Cato publishes Friedman and Hayek on Freedom, a Russian-language collection of essays by those two Nobel Laureates. The book is distributed to Russian émigrés in the United States and Western Europe and smuggled into the Soviet Union.

1986

In Left, Right, and Babyboom, editor David Boaz and other contributors to the volume argue that the babyboom generation is conservative economically and tolerant socially.

In The New Right v. the Constitution, Stephen Macedo argues that the majoritarianism of many conservative judges tramples upon constitutionally guaranteed liberties.

P. T. Bauer is honored at a conference, "Development Economics after 40 Years."

1987

Cato celebrates its tenth anniversary at a dinner for more than 600 people at the Willard Hotel.

The New York Times writes, "Cato has managed to generate more activity and interest across a wider political spectrum than some of its more sedate competitors with much larger budgets."

Cato published The Rule of Experts by S. David Young, in which the author maintains that occupational licensing results in the misallocation of labor and harms consumers.

Cato co-publishes The Search for Stable Money with the University of Chicago Press, which includes essays by three Nobel laureates and 20 other contributors.

1988

Cato hosts a conference in Shanghai titled "Economic Reform in China: Problems and Prospects." It is the first free-market conference held in mainland China since its communist takeover. Milton Friedman is among the participants.

Cato’s day-long conference on the privatization of the postal service is picketed by postal union activists.

1989

Cato hosts a day-long conference titled "NATO at 40: Confronting a Changing World." Among the speakers are author Irving Kristol and Earl Ravenal of Georgetown University.

In South Africa’s War against Capitalism, Walter E. Williams argues that "it is the free play of market forces -- with no intervention by political forces -- that has always been seen as the enemy of white privilege and that apartheid ideology has always sought to defeat."

In The Rights Retained by the People: The History and Meaning of the Ninth Amendment, editor Randy Barnett argues that the long-ignored Ninth Amendment is best understood neither as affording judges no guidance nor as an invitation to judges to impose their own vision on the Constitution but as creating a general presumption in favor of individual liberty.

Cato hosts its first annual Benefactor Summit on Grand Cayman Island. Among the speakers are James C. Miller III, Charles Murray, and Warren Brookes.

1990

Cato hosts a week-long conference in Moscow titled "Transition to Freedom: The New Soviet Challenge." Participants include Nobel laureate James Buchanan, Charles Murray, and numerous members of the Russian parliament. At the conference Cato president Ed Crane presents a bust of F. A. Hayek to Yevgeny Primakov, chairman of the Council of the Union of the Supreme Soviet. More than 1,000 Soviet citizens attend their first "open forum."

Cato acquires Regulation magazine from the American Enterprise Institute.

Cato publishes The Crisis in Drug Prohibition, edited by David Boaz, which includes essays by 27 journalists, politicians, and scholars.

1991

Cato hosts its second conference in Moscow, "All the President’s Men: Perestroika Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow." The opening night speaker is Vladimir Bukovsky, who is making his first trip back to his native land since his exile in the 1970s.

Cato hosts a conference titled "America in the Gulf: Vital Interests or Pointless Entanglement?" about a week before Operation Desert Storm began. The conference papers were later published as America Entangled: The Persian Gulf Crisis and Its Consequences, edited by Ted Galen Carpenter.

Future justice Stephen Breyer is among the speakers at a Regulation conference, "Making Sense of Safety."

Cato publishes Liberating Schools: Education in the Inner City, edited by David Boaz. Many of the contributors argue that only increased choice and autonomy will improve the plight of urban education.

Cato breaks ground for its new headquarters at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

1992

In Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming, Patrick J. Michaels shows that there is neither theoretical nor empirical evidence for a catastrophic greenhouse effect and thus no case for what Vice President Al Gore calls a "wrenching transformation" of the American economy.

Patient Power by John Goodman and Gerald Musgrave makes medical savings accounts a popular and much-discussed idea.

Cato publishes Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered by Joan Kennedy Taylor, which describes traditional American feminism as emphasizing empowerment, not victimization; self-help, not governmental involvement; and individual, not group, rights.

Cato hosts "Liberty in the Americas: Free Trade and Beyond," a week-long conference in Mexico City, to discuss NAFTA and other means to liberalize trade.

Cato publishes Ted Galen Carpenter’s A Search for Enemies: America’s Alliances after the Cold War, which makes the case for strategic independence and disengagement.

1993

Cato moves into its new headquarters at 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. The building’s auditorium is named for Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek.

Cato publishes two new books on environmental policy: Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse by Ronald Bailey and Apocalypse Not: Science, Economics, and Environmentalism by Ben Bolch and Harold Lyons.

Cato publishes Market Liberalism: A Paradigm for the 21st Century, which provides advice to policymakers in numerous areas.

1994

Cato introduces the idea of replacing the income tax with a national sales tax at a Capitol Hill conference.

Cato prints more than 300,000 copies of an abridged edition of Patient Power.

Cato scholars appear on more than 100 television and radio shows critiquing the Clinton health care plan, including an NBC Town Hall Meeting with Hillary Clinton.

Cato continues to examine the issue of educational freedom, publishing School Choice: How You Need It, How You Get It by David Harmer.

Cato publishes Perpetuating Poverty: The World Bank, the IMF, and the Developing World, edited by Doug Bandow and Ian Vásquez, which demonstrates that many foreign aid programs have been dismal failures.

Cato publishes The Politics and Law of Term Limits, edited by Ed Crane and Roger Pilon. Among the contributors are Thomas Mann, Lloyd Cutler, George Will, and Paul Jacob.

The Wall Street Journal writes, "Cato’s intellectual guns now roar throughout the capital."

1995

Cato publishes its first Cato Handbook for Congress. The book, a 358-page, 39-chapter volume, is described by the Washington Post as a "soup-to-nuts agenda to reduce spending, kill programs, terminate whole agencies and dramatically restrict the power of the federal government."

Cato launches its award-winning web site (www.cato.org).

The Institute launches the Cato Project on Social Security Privatization, co-chaired by José Piñera, the man responsible for the privatization of Chile’s pension system.

Cato publishes Rep. Henry Hyde’s Forfeiting Our Property Rights: Is Your Property Safe from Seizure? and copublishes Richard Epstein’s Simple Rules for a Complex World with Harvard University Press.

Cato publishes Bradley A. Smith’s Policy Analysis, "Campaign Finance Regulation: Faulty Assumptions and Undemocratic Consequences." Smith argues that spending and campaign contribution limits violate the First Amendment.

Cato’s sponsor program passes 10,000 participants.

1996

Cato hosts a day-long conference on the United Nations titled "The United Nations and Global Intervention" that is attended by nearly 200 people. Numerous speakers argue that the United States should withdraw from the U.N.

In The End of Welfare: Fighting Poverty in the Civil Society, Michael Tanner argues that President Clinton’s efforts to reform government assistance programs have been merely cosmetic and that it is time to end, not reform, welfare.

Along with the Fraser Institute, Cato publishes Economic Freedom of the World: 1975-1995, which demonstrates quantitatively that economic freedom has produced prosperity throughout the world, while central planning and government control has produced stagnation.

Cato publishes Policy Analysis no. 250, "Capital Crimes: Political Centers As Parasite Economies," by Richard K. Vedder.

1997

Cato executive vice president David Boaz publishes two books with the Free Press: Libertarianism: A Primer and The Libertarian Reader.

Cato publishes its second Handbook for Congress with 554 pages and 57 chapters.

Steve Forbes, Nat Hentoff, Fred Smith, and P. J. O'Rourke speak to 2000 attendees at Cato's 20th anniversary celebration.

Cato creates an interactive Web site on Social Security (www.socialsecurity.org) with a calculator that shows how much better off one would be in a private system.

Nathaniel Branden highlights "Atlas and the World," a 40th anniversary celebration of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, cosponsored by Cato and the Institute for Objectivist Studies.

Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan keynotes Cato's 15th Annual Monetary Conference. In addition to an overflow crowd in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium, more than 1,000 people watched Cato's Web broadcast of the conference.

The Cato Institute publishes a pocket-sized edition of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution and distributes more than 2.5 million copies, by 2002.

1998

(Debt) Free at Last! Cato's $14 million capital campaign is a success, resulting in the Institute becoming debt free.

Cato University program (www.cato-university.org) is launched under the direction of Tom G. Palmer.

Cato establishes the B. Kenneth Simon Chair in Constitutional Studies, the first endowed chair at Cato. Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs, is named to the chair.

Cato's newly established Center for Trade Policy Studies quickly gains respect as a leading academic and policy force for free trade in the world.

Cato's fourth biennial "Fiscal Report Card on America's Governors" draws the ire of big spending governors.

1999

Cato grows for the ninth consecutive year -- to a record budget of $13.8 million and 14,000 sponsors.

104--the number of calls for increased federal intervention into civil society by President Clinton in his final State of the Union address, according to a count by the Cato Institute.

Cato establishes the Project on Criminal Justice, under the direction of Timothy Lynch.

Cato holds a major conference on the Balkan War in May, and Ted Galen Carpenter, Cato's vice president for defense and foreign policy, edits NATO's Empty Victory: A Postmortem on the Balkan War.

At the conference "Seattle and Beyond, the Future of the WTO," Brink Lindsey, director of trade policy at Cato, prophetically warns that the World Trade Organization's new round of global trade negotiations would dramatically collapse.

Cato publishes 62 studies and 9 books. Feature-length opinion pieces by Cato scholars placed in news publications at least 1,245 times, an increase of 35 percent over 1998. Citations in major national newspapers increase 26 percent.

Cato publishes its third Handbook for Congress: Policy Recommendations for the 106th Congress, which Rep. J. D. Hayworth calls "essential to sanity and survival on Capitol Hill."

New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson highlights a day long conference on the failure of drug prohibition.

2000

Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies holds a major conference on "The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton," also the title of the book that Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs, edited from the conference proceedings.

Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for foreign policy and defense studies at Cato, edits a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies on the future of the NATO alliance.

Cato joins with the Hong Kong Centre for Economic Research to host a major conference on "Globalization, the WTO, and Capital Flows: Hong Kong's Legacy, China's Future," Cato's third conference in China.

At the end of the millennium, Cato publishes It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. Written by senior fellow Stephen Moore and the late Julian Simon, the book is illustrated with more than 100 full-color charts.

The Center for Representative Government is established under the direction of John Samples.

The Cato Institute book The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, by Pat Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at Cato, and Robert Balling, is the number one paperback and number two hardcover edition among books on global warming on Amazon.com.

Cato's two-day conference in New York, titled "Solving the Global Pensions Crisis II: The Privatization Revolution," attracts participants from 22 countries, including high-ranking delegations from Russia and China.

Russian social security reformers invite José Piñera, co-chairman of Cato's Project on Social Security privatization, and Ian Vásquez, director of Cato's Project on Global Economic Liberty, to discuss Russia's economic reform agenda with President Vladimir Putin's top economic advisers.

The Cato Institute takes its Social Security message to the airwaves with a donor-funded radio advertising campaign that started in New York and Philadelphia. By the end of 2000, stations across the country are using the 30- and 60-second spots as public service announcements.

Copies of Cato's pocket Constitution are distributed to each of the 7,354 state legislators and each of the 813 candidates for federal offices.

Bradley A. Smith, a former adjunct scholar at Cato, is sworn into the Federal Election Commission at a Cato Institute reception.

Cato's Daily Dispatch, with more than 5,000 subscribers, and Cato's Daily Commentary are provided to users of Palm Pilots and other handheld devices.

Despite having a budget much smaller than those of many other think tanks, the Cato Institute receives the second most major media mentions, according to media watch group FAIR.

2001

President George W. Bush appoints members to the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The commission includes a former Cato vice president and a Cato fellow, and two Cato staffers are drafted for the commission staff.

Cato's Project on Social Security Privatization distributes briefing books to the members of the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security. Cato holds a two-day conference on Social Security reform, "Privatizing Social Security: Beyond the Theory."

Financial Times writes that Cato is the "least whorish and most intellectually honest of Washington's think tanks." Cato president Ed Crane responds: "Not exactly a bumper sticker, I suppose, but praise nevertheless."

Jerry Taylor, director of natural resource studies at Cato, correctly predicts that, given time, supply and demand would bring down the price of oil. Taylor also returns to California to remind everyone out there that Cato predicted the crisis they found themselves in and warns the state to drop its "North Korean model."

Cato holds several international events, including its 19th annual monetary conference, in Mexico City; a conference in Beijing on China's pension system; and Cato University in Montreal.

Cato's celebrates James Madison's 250th birthday in March with a conference to discuss Madison's vision of liberty. Nobel Laureate and Cato Distinguished Fellow James Buchanan delivers the luncheon address.

The Cato Handbook for Congress is seen on Sen. Orrin Hatch's desk on Nightline.

A distinguished international committee is named to select the winner of the first biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

Cato President Ed Crane receives the Frederick Douglass Award from the Committee for Urban Renewal and Education at a Washington dinner in March.

Cato Mencken Research Fellow P. J. O'Rourke hits the road, speaking at Cato City Seminars across the country.

2002

The first Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is presented to Peter Bauer, for his pioneering work in development economics.

The Cato Institute celebrates its 25th anniversary at a gala dinner featuring P. J. O'Rourke and John Stossel.