Doug Bandow

Doug Bandow is vice president of policy at Citizen Outreach, the Cobden Fellow in International Economics at the Institute for Policy Innovation, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and serves as adjunct scholar for The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a former special assistant to President Reagan; he is also a graduate of Stanford Law School and a member of the California and D.C. bars.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, specializing in foreign policy and civil liberties. He worked as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan and editor of the political magazine Inquiry. He writes regularly for leading publications such as Fortune magazine, National Interest, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Times. Bandow speaks frequently at academic conferences, on college campuses, and to business groups. Bandow has been a regular commentator on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. He holds a JD from Stanford University.

Doug Bandow's hard-hitting and consistently libertarian column is syndicated nationally by Copley News Service. In addition, he has written for Harper's, The New Republic, Washington Post, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the American Spectator, USA Today, and many, many other magazines and newspapers. He is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980's, left disillusioned, and later wrote how that administration had betrayed its promise of less government and lower taxes.

In the bad way [to sell ideas], you can take money in exchange for which you will say anything. Now, to be fair to Doug Bandow, he most certainly did not do the latter. ... [H]e stands "accused" of having written op-eds that elicited payment from Jack Abramoff ... Bandow wrote favorably on behalf of the Northern Mariana Islands and its industry's desire to continue to be unregulated by US labor law. The method is seedy ... but the goal is good. ... He is a libertarian after all, one of the more principled writers out there, and the positions he took were not incompatible with his overall political perspective.

Little in life is more tragic than the shooting stars, the brilliant lights who illuminate the truth and brighten people’s lives, only to flame out before the history books take note. Roy A. Childs, Jr., was one such phenomenon. A leading libertarian writer, editor, and activist, Roy was also a good friend ... Roy Childs was a treasure to all who knew him. But his life has benefited, and continues to benefit, many more people than just those who had the pleasure of meeting him ... Liberty Against Power is a fitting tribute to someone who gave so much for so long to so many.

War has become a centerpiece of American politics. The war on terrorism is the focus of U.S. foreign policy. A real war is being fought in Iraq. Jimmy Carter proclaimed the "moral equivalent of war" over energy. Some analysts are advocating a war on obesity. But the longest-running ongoing "war" is the war on drugs ... While Miller and Miron might not convince the most dedicated drug warriors, they have presented a powerful case that the drug war is counterproductive ... Americans can no longer blithely assume that drug prohibition is making them safer and better off.

When ethnic Albanian guerrillas originally rejected the Rambouillet peace settlement for Kosovo fashioned by the Clinton administration, a Clinton official raged, "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with [them] to do something entirely in their own interest—which is to say yes to an interim agreement—and they defy us." ... Death tolls in the millions (Angola, Sudan, Rwanda, Tibet), hundreds of thousands ..., and tens of thousands ... are common. The estimated 12-month death toll of 2,000 in Kosovo was exceeded even by the number of dead in Northern Ireland's sectarian violence.

The Founders vested the power to declare war in Congress because they feared presidents would do precisely what they are doing today—regularly taking the nation into overseas conflicts. It is all too easy to loose the dogs of war; it is impossible to control where they go afterwards ... As Secretary of State John Quincy Adams observed last century, the United States should be the well-wisher of the liberty and independence of all, but does not need to "go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." To do so, he warned, would destroy the essential values that set her apart ...

Peace is boring. How else to explain the search by some conservatives for a new enemy? After the Cold War the foreign policy establishment could have gratefully accepted peace, stopped meddling around the globe, and demobilized America's outsize military. Instead, it found other enemies ... There will be no more important bilateral relationship over the next century than that between the United States and China. Much depends on the ability of the two nations to overcome cultural and political differences to cooperate peacefully. The first step in doing so is for America not to go to Asia in search of enemies to combat.

The legendary third rail of American politics, Soc-ial Security, is lighting up. The administration has proposed to move, ever so gently, toward a private system, while a bipartisan congressional coalition is determined to keep Americans locked into an inferior retirement system ... The alternative is what [Democrat] Robert Pozen calls the "do-nothing plan." Sit around while the system crumbles, then enact draconian tax hikes while cutting benefits. Such a strategy ... will wreck the retirement of the poor and disadvantaged, who foolishly relied on the government for security.