Featuring David Boaz, Executive Vice President, Cato Institute; and Matt Welch, Editor in Chief, Reason; vs. Ramesh Ponnuru, Columnist and Senior Editor, National Review; and Conor Friedersdorf, Staff Writer, The Atlantic; moderated by David Kirby, Vice President and Senior Fellow, Cato Institute.
A new, special issue of the Cato Journal considers the unintended consequences of government intervention by examining a number of public policies ranging from occupational licensing to the War on Poverty to the minimum wage and public education.
Perhaps Republicans should work with the states toward restoring the principle that political parties are private entities, not extensions of the government, and how they run their affairs are for their members alone to decide.
Published in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Kelo v. New London, Cornerstone of Liberty: Property Rights in 21st Century America made a powerful contribution to the firestorm of interest in protecting property rights. Now in its second edition, Cornerstone of Liberty has been fully updated by authors Timothy and Christina Sandefur, and examines how dozens of new developments in courtrooms and legislatures across the country have shifted the landscape of private property rights since 2005.
The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is the philosophy of freedom,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.
The End of Overkill? Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy
Featuring Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow in Defense and Homeland Security Policy, Cato Institute; Elbridge Colby, Center for Naval Analyses; Hans M. Kristensen, Director of the Nuclear Information Project, Federation of American Scientists; and Matt Fay, PhD Program, Temple University History Department; moderated by Christopher Preble, Vice President for Defense and Foreign Policy Studies, Cato Institute.
President Obama recently voiced his ambition to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to as few as 1,000 deployed warheads. Yet while the United States has cut the arsenal’s size greatly since the Cold War’s end, its missions and composition have barely changed. Around 1,600 deployed nuclear weapons remain tied to a triad of systems — bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched ballistic missiles — that are designed for preemptive strikes against enemy arsenals. Current plans call for modernizing all three systems, which could cost taxpayers over $100 billion. A new Cato White Paper — The End of Overkill? Reassessing U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy — argues for getting rid of the triad by basing U.S. nuclear weapons exclusively on submarines. It explains how the triad came from bureaucratic compromises, not strategic necessity; punctures the myths that sustained it; and shows how its burden on taxpayers is increasingly unjustified.
Please join us for a discussion of these issues at a forum featuring the paper’s authors and two leading experts on U.S. nuclear policy.
