Cato Institute

The Cato Institute and The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty International Selection Committee are proud to announce that the first recipient is the distinguished British economist Peter Bauer, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics. Professor Bauer was chosen for his pioneering work in the field of development economics, where he stood virtually alone for many years as a critic of state-led development policy with its emphasis on central planning and external foreign aid.

The Cato Institute today announced that the winner of the second biennial Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty is internationally recognized economist and property rights activist Hernando de Soto ... Beginning in his native Peru, de Soto has focused on a revolutionary concept that is having repercussions throughout the world's poor countries: the lack of formal property rights as the source of poverty in poor countries. His decades of pioneering work, for presidents and in the streets on behalf of property rights for the poor, have led to global acclaim.

The Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, named in honor of perhaps the greatest champion of liberty in the 20th century, is presented every other year to an individual who has made a significant contribution to advance human freedom ... The late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman agreed in 2001 to lend his name to the prize, which has become the leading international award for acknowledging contributions to the promotion of individual liberty.

Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They're called libertarians.

[Even] while still at college, [Childs] was fortunate in having a series of patrons and mentors within the movement ... Among these [were] ... Murray Rothbard, Robert Kephart, Charles Koch, and Ed Crane ... While in San Francisco, Childs ... became a research fellow at the Cato Institute. After The Libertarian Review was closed in 1981, Childs remained in Washington as a Cato policy analyst until 1984 ... Since [his death], the Cato Institute has established a Roy Childs Library in its Washington headquarters ...

It was interesting to observe various speakers pulling from their pockets small, leatherette-bound booklets, published by Cato, containing both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution. They held them up and recited the oft-quoted mantra of the evening: "free markets and limited government" ... This mantra continued to be invoked throughout the evening, as the speakers lamented the parallel diminution in liberty and expansion of state power: increased economic regulation, governments siphoning off some 45% of the wealth produced each year, and decreasing parental control over government schools ...

One Cato scholar asks, rhetorically, "show me the libertarianism"–a challenge one might put to the Cato Institute itself in regard to certain key issues, such as as Israel's recent invasion of Lebanon and the supposed benefits of the U.S. invading Pakistan. The Cato Unbound format–potentially useful in discussing libertarian ideas with potential allies, as well as adversaries–features a lead essay by someone like Moulitsas, framed by a number of responses from Cato Institute scholars and hangers-on. But the veritable chorus of hisses and catcalls that greeted Moulitsas' respectful overture was outrageously boorish ...

A devastating amicus curiae brief has been submitted by three Cato Institute legal scholars and University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein ... [T]hey demonstrate that the likelihood of any net benefit to New London is extremely small ... and that the significant uncompensated costs ... were never taken into account in the city's cost-benefit calculation ... The Cato/Epstein brief hits the bull's eye in observing that eminent-domain cases like this one "result in a systematic unfairness to the individuals who are forced to sacrifice their property to some fuzzy vision of the public good."

[Rothbard] was ... the person who named the Cato Institute ... Rothbard's legendary breaks—including those with Rand, with Cato, with the LP, ... etc.—were of two types: people stabbing him in the back or Rothbard getting fed up with a long series of despicable sellouts ... A very special treat is the truth about the Cato-Rothbard split, in print for the first time: Rothbard couldn't take the growing conventionalism of the outfit. Obviously, Rothbard's instincts were borne out by later events: he would have left anyway when Cato started backing vouchers, new long-range bombers, forced savings, etc.

I have never been on Cato's payroll, and I have not written anything for Cato since 1995. I did participate in book forums at Cato for two of my last five books. Cato has some excellent folks; Tim Lynch does superb analysis of how the Constitution is getting boarhawged. But I have been surprised that top folks at Cato have endorsed the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretap program ... and unleashing the FBI to conduct warrantless surveillance ... Cato is also holding a debate between two of its top folks on the question of whether Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping is legal.

[Taylor] arrived in San Francisco one day in May of 1979 ... Over the next year and a half, Joan ... established ties with the Cato Institute, then in its second year of operation out of a suite of offices in San Francisco about half a block down the street from the ones that housed the Libertarian Review. These ties with Cato would last for the rest of her professional life. She began by accepting a position as a biweekly commentator on Byline, Cato's daily radio program, which ran Monday through Friday on more than 150 radio stations coast to coast throughout the 1980s.

In his long career, Leonard was associated with the Volker Fund ..., the Cato Institute, and finally, the Atlas Network. I believe I originally met Leonard in 1978, at the first Cato Institute summer seminar at Wake Forest University. (I was a newspaper reporter in those days.) However, I may have been introduced to him the year before in San Francisco. That was the year Cato was founded. Leonard was an original staff member and editor of its unfortunately short-lived journal, Literature of Liberty. I remember Leonard's lectures at the Cato seminar very well. Among other things, he lectured on the history of Western imperialism.

I'm surprised that, for all its comprehensiveness, Radicals for Capitalism, fails to tell the real story of Cato's founding: it was Rothbard who persuaded billionaire Charles Koch, in the winter of 1976, to set up a libertarian thinktank, along with a magazine (actually two magazines, Inquiry, an "outreach" publication, and Libertarian Review, a previously-existing movement bulletin), along with a student group ... Cato's turn toward Washington, exemplified by its physical move there in the late 1980s, was meant to take the "radical" out of "radicals for capitalism."

The Cato Institute has an unusual political cause—which is no political cause whatsoever. We are here tonight to dedicate ourselves to that cause ... We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity ... All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people ... I don't know what's good for you. You don't know what's good for me. We don't know what's good for mankind. And it sometimes seems as though we're the only people who don't ... There, ladies and gentlemen, you have the Cato Institute's program in a nutshell: government should be against the law.

[I]n 1977, The Cato Institute was founded with Koch money and with Crane as its President. Cato was a new libertarian think tank. Murray Rothbard and Bill Evers joined Cato, Murray as a founding board member who even named the institute. For a few years, there was considerable overlap between Cato and the LP leadership. But Murray and Crane fell out and Murray was kicked out. Thereafter Murray referred to the Cato libertarians as "Craniacs." ... The good news is that they all have done great work at Cato since and the movement has certainly benefited from that. They have even come back to calling themselves libertarians.

A sabbatical leave in the fall of 1977 found my wife and I ... in San Francisco at the newly created Cato Institute on Montgomery Street. I did several book reviews for Cato's flagship magazine, Inquiry ... and I became friendly with its entrepreneurial president, Ed Crane, and Cato's financial angel, Charles Koch ... In 1983 I approached David Boaz at the Cato Institute with an idea for a new antitrust book ... The book titled Antitrust Policy: The Case For Repeal was published by Cato in 1984. Thanks, David. (I am now an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute.)

[I]t is the institutions that have been so crucial for advancing the ideas of the individuals who have worked in and through them ... [W]hen I left the Reagan administration ... in 1988 it was to establish Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies, the purpose of which was to help change the climate of ideas to one more conducive to liberty under limited constitutional government. For nearly twenty-five years now, through books, monographs, op-eds, conferences, forums, lectures, amicus briefs, media appearances, and, especially, the annual Cato Supreme Court Review, we have worked to bring that change about ...

[Crane] has built Cato from a three-person storefront operation into a 100-employee public policy powerhouse. Thinkers of all ilk have flocked to Cato's six-story modernist glass headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue (complete with live palm trees to remind Crane of his native California) to attend seminars, speeches and book discussions. Cato scholars appear regularly on TV talk shows and newspaper op-ed pages. Capitol Hill seized on a Cato idea to create health care savings accounts, and the U.S. Supreme Court has incorporated some of Cato's arguments into its opinions.

[T]he Catoites live and work in Washington, D.C., where partisan myths are sonorously uttered and routinely believed ... (Say, aren't these the same folks who are now telling us that twenty-five years of libertarian activism and scholarship have led to the growth of government, and "this isn't as bad as it seems"?) I don't mean to pick on the Cato Institute–well, actually, I do mean to, but didn't intend to give in to the temptation so readily. Yet my point is that if even these (former) stalwarts of libertarianism are sneering at Paul, then their disdain is but a pale reflection of an even harsher elite opinion ...

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorialized: "... Mr. Bandow, the once-respected senior scholar at the Cato Institute, was on the take ..." ... [A]s for Cato's own claim that its "scholarship is not for sale," someone seems to have overlooked ... that the entire campaign to privatize Social Security ... was bought and paid for with millions from Wall Street. And none other than the Scaife Foundation is one of its top donors. So we are supposed to believe that it is evil for one columnist to take a few thousand but perfectly okay for a newspaper publisher to pay a think tank millions to then pay an intellectual who then writes for the newspaper?

A week before her 21st birthday, Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum left the Soviet Union, never to return. Officially, she had come only to visit family in Chicago—but Rosenbaum had other plans. As a girl, she had watched the Bolshevik revolution reduce her middle-class family to poverty, and was convinced that communism would destroy Russia ... Her enormous contribution to the growth of libertarianism—a term she herself rejected—was not, in the end, her philosophical arguments for a free society, but rather the literary vision she presented of that society and of the kind of person best suited to it.

The Cato Institute was established in 1977 as a nonpartisan public policy research foundation dedicated to advancing the principles of individual liberty, free markets, and limited government. Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies was established in 1989 to help restore the principles of limited constitutional government and to secure those rights, both enumerated and unenumerated, that are the foundation of individual liberty ... The instant case raises squarely the question of the right of association under the First Amendment and thus is of central interest to Cato and the Center.

Among the most erudite conservative authors and political thinkers of her time, the sum total of Isabel Mary Paterson's formal education consisted of two years in a tiny log schoolhouse. Born Isabel Bowler on Canada's Manitoulin Island, she came to the United States as a young girl, where she lived with her family — including eight siblings ... It is hard to imagine that this would have brought anything but pleasure to the woman who once wrote: "If there were just one gift you could choose, but nothing barred, what would it be? We wish you then your own wish; you name it. Ours is liberty, now and forever."

Readers of Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved "Little House" children's books already know crusading libertarian writer Rose Wilder Lane as "baby Rose," whose birth and early years are chronicled in The First Four Years. Born on the frontier, in America's Dakota Territory ... Lane changed many lives, both through her writing and her personal example. If it turns out to be true that, as she wrote in Give Me Liberty, "individualism has the strength to resist all attacks," Rose Wilder Lane will have helped to make it true by lending so much of her own strength to individualists everywhere.

Doherty begins his book with a paean to the plans of the Cato Institute to "privatize" Social Security.

... One way to rescue America from the potential fiscal wreckage of Social Security, said the libertarians at Cato [Institute], was to give citizens personal control over their own savings and their own retirement ...

Doherty treats the Cato plan as if it were completely noncontroversial among libertarians. Quite the contrary, some libertarians view with alarm schemes to "privatize" Social Security that require vast increases in government spending in the transition period to the new system.

In Regulation, many of the nation's top economists, law professors, and other policy experts offer easy-to-understand guidance and insights on microeconomics and regulatory policy affecting every American's life. For more than three decades, this quarterly journal has examined nearly every market, from agriculture to health and transportation, and nearly every government intervention, from interstate commerce to labor law and price controls ... Regulation guarantees the careful, in‐​depth analysis you need to stay on top of regulatory and economic policymaking in Washington, D.C.

Peter Goettler: I think the greatest victory is the mainstreaming of libertarianism as a political philosophy, which is really a sea change from 1977 ...
One of the difficult things for Cato is that the things we're fighting are so big, right? The entitlement state, and government spending and just the power of the federal government. With meaningful budget, but still a small ... We're a $30 million dollar, roughly organization, that's a pretty big fight and a pretty big mismatch ... [Cato] really stands out in Washington as a very principled organization and one that truly is independent and nonpartisan.