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At a gala dinner in Washington, the Cato Institute awarded the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty to Jimmy Lai, a businessman and vocal advocate for democracy and freedom in Hong Kong. Lai was unable to accept the award in person because he is presently imprisoned by the Chinese government.
Libertarians are tempted to be too depressed. We read the morning papers, or watch the cable shows, and we think the world is indeed on “the road to serfdom.” But we should reject a counsel of despair. We’ve been fighting ignorance, superstition, privilege, and power for many centuries. We and our classical liberal forebears have won great victories. The fight is not over, but liberalism remains the only workable operating system for a world of peace, growth, and progress.
Libertarian legal scholars, activists, and public interest lawyers have made valuable contributions on a range of important constitutional issues, including property rights, school choice, Second Amendment rights, free speech, religious liberties, and more. But we have largely ignored three significant constitutional issues, thereby passing up valuable opportunities to expand liberty: zoning, constitutional constraints on immigration restrictions, and racial profiling in law enforcement.
It is hard to conclude that educational freedom has turned a corner from exception to norm. But it has made huge progress over the last few years, and it is almost certainly here not just to stay but to flourish.
Although important books on freedom were published in the 1930s and ’40s by such writers as Albert Jay Nock, Garet Garrett, and F. A. Hayek, three women—at times friends, at other times estranged—were at the forefront of what became the libertarian movement as we know it today.
The natural tendency is to associate high inflation with monetary policy, faulting the Federal Reserve for “printing too much money,” but the current bout of rising inflation is not entirely the Fed’s fault.
President Biden’s record on economic policies suggests that he either learned very little in his Econ 101 course or has forgotten most of what he learned.
Every adult should be free and should have equal dignity. Everyone is to be treated as having equal permission to try out things. New religions. New machines. New relations between men and women. That’s true liberalism.
The rise in opioid deaths did not result mainly from the increase in opioid prescribing. New restrictions have exacerbated rather than ameliorated the upward trend. The right policy response is to reduce restrictions on opioid prescribing, perhaps to the point of ending the requirement to get a prescription altogether.
Wrongful convictions harm the victims and their families most, but they also undermine the principles of a free society. This corruption of the proper role of limited government comes with deep moral harms and erodes public confidence in the criminal justice system.
Laws surrounding elections have taken center stage as Republicans and Democrats fight it out over how we pick our elected representatives. There’s a lot at stake, but both parties are missing the mark in important ways, focusing on relatively minor concerns while looming threats go unaddressed.
The toxic partisanship that plagues us can’t be cured with a change in presidential tone. The modern presidency is a divider, not a uniter. It has become too powerful to be anything else.
The United States undoubtedly faces real economic and geopolitical challenges, but the solution lies not in copying China’s topdown economic planning on the grounds that the U.S. system is failing and that China is an inevitable economic power.
The federal government already intervenes heavily in infrastructure through spending, regulations, and taxes, and all three levers distort investment. Biden would ratchet up the use of each lever and further reduce the role of markets in guiding infrastructure investment.
