News Release

August 16, 2002

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Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World
New Cato book emphasizes the trend toward free trade, free markets, and limits on government in modern politics

Jimmy Carter. Tip O'Neill. Energy czars. Gas lines. ABC-NBC-CBS. Mao Tse-tung. The Soviet Union. Apartheid. It was a different era. What wasn't so obvious in 1977 was that it was also the end of an era.

Over the past 25 years, more people around the world have been choosing open markets, open societies, free trade, and individual liberty. Information, commerce, and investment increasingly flow in response to the choices of free people, not the dictates of government. These changes are celebrated in the new book, Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World, edited by David Boaz, the executive vice president at the Cato Institute.

In this new collection of groundbreaking essays from the past 25 years, contributors discuss the issues that the Cato Institute has popularized in the past quarter century: Karl Popper on the failure of communism, Peter Bauer on economic development, Helen Suzman on the end of apartheid, F. A. Hayek on money and information, Milton Friedman on markets in China, Mario Vargas Llosa on "neoliberalism," and Carolyn Weaver and José Piñera on Social Security.

As Ed Crane, founder and president of the Cato Institute, has stated, "The great American experiment in civil society, predicated on respect for the dignity of individual human beings, free from the grasping hands of politicians, is the answer." Indeed, more than 200 years after the founding of this country, there is a renewed vibrancy in the idea of liberty both here and abroad.

Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World