• Examining the state of gun rights in the District of Columbia since the Heller case, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler quotes Cato Chairman Robert A. Levy on the American Constitution Society blog.

• Cato Senior Fellow Daniel J. Mitchell weighs in on Obama’s tax policy on The Hill’s Congress blog:

President-Elect Obama reportedly will include $300 billion of tax relief in his so-called stimulus scheme. This supposedly will give fiscal conservatives a reason to vote for the proposal, but lawmakers who favor limited government should look before they leap – especially if they actually want to improve economic growth.

• Fr33A​gents​.com, a blog devoted to following the liberty movement, embeds Cato’s new video, Downsizing the Federal Government. Tom Pearson writes:

As federal and state governments scramble to shore up the tanking economy by doing more of what got us to this point in the first place: meddling and spending, it will be interesting to see which government programs/​expenditures, if any, get cut. No doubt budget conversations this year will be drastically different than last year’s, as expenditures and “services” deemed indispensable and essential last year suddenly don’t seem as necessary.

• Writing about the efficiency of private enterprise over public projects, Wayne Crews links to Cato’s recent study, Markets vs. Monopolies in Education: A Global Review of the Evidence, on “Dysfunction Network.”

• Charles R. Anderson comments on Daniel J. Mitchell’s post, Obama Wants 600,000 More Bureaucrats on his blog, “Objectivist Individualist”