Travis Fisher Disclaimer: I served as a staff economist at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 2006 to 2013 and as a commissioner adviser from 2018 to 2020. On Monday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) issued a “watershed” new ruling addressing electricity transmission and the need to expand America’s power grid. The commission claims the new ruling, titled Order No. 1920 (a ...
Neal McCluskey and Colleen Hroncich On May 17, 1954, something necessary but not sufficient for American liberty happened: The US Supreme Court struck down de jure racial segregation in public schools. After the Civil War ended legal prohibitions against black Americans receiving even basic literacy, finally Brown v. Board of Education took the next step, declaring forced government separation in ...
Clark Neily “I have a theory: Qualified immunity has already been bitten by one of the walkers in the Walking Dead, and it’s in the zombification process.” So said David French on last week’s episode of The Dispatch’s Advisory Opinions podcast while discussing a recent Fifth Circuit decision denying qualified immunity to a pair of Houston police officers in an utterly bizarre false‐arrest ...
Nicholas Anthony Governments around the world are weighing whether to launch central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs. But are CBDCs even a good idea? That was one of the questions NPR hosts Paddy Hirsch and Adrian Ma asked this week on the Indicator from Planet Money. As Hirsch pointed out, “[CBDCs] are generating a frisson of excitement in some quarters. But in ...
Scott Lincicome Today we’ve published two new essays for Cato’s Defending Globalization project: The More Resources We Consume, the More We Have by Marian L. Tupy, explains that globalization supercharges the process of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination, thereby leading to greater resource abundance. How Global Markets Helped the Video Game Industry by Juan Londoño, shows that globalization has made ...
Nicholas Anthony President Biden’s “war on junk fees” is only picking up steam. On May 9, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a hearing to focus on fees charged for financial services, and it unfortunately showcased many of the core problems with this “war.” Senator Sherrod Brown (D‑OH) opened the hearing by claiming corporate greed was the ...
Clark Packard Today, the Biden administration announced it is quadrupling tariffs on imported electric vehicles (EVs) from China, while also imposing new tariffs on steel and aluminum, certain critical minerals, solar cells, batteries and battery components, ship‐to‐shore cranes, medical products, and semiconductors. The tariffs will shield from Chinese competition many of the very US industries the Biden administration showered with ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Last March, a report from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) projected a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians, including as many as 40,000 primary care physicians. The report noted that, as of 2021, as many as 17 percent of active physicians were over age 65, with an additional 25 percent of the physician workforce between age 55 ...
Ryan Bourne Today the Cato Institute publishes a new book that I’ve edited, The War on Prices: How Popular Misconceptions about Inflation, Prices, and Value Create Bad Policy. The multi‐author volume* debunks a host of popular misconceptions about the recent inflation, documents the harmful consequences of current and historical government price controls, and pushes back on the misguided moral and economic arguments ...
Michael F. Cannon Rena Conti, Richard Frank, and David Cutler recently published a very useful piece in the New England Journal of Medicine under the title, “The Myth of the Free Market for Pharmaceuticals.” Conti, Frank, and Cutler shatter the common myths that the United States has “largely unregulated prices” for medical care (Los Angeles Times) or is “one of the only ...