Chris Edwards Commenting on possible US Postal Service (USPS) privatization a few months ago, President Donald Trump said, “it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time.” Indeed, they have. Cato has been making the case for privatization since the 1980s. Then with the rise of the internet in the 1990s, it became even more ...
Romina Boccia and Dominik Lett On April 5, the Senate approved a modified budget framework, which is a betrayal of the House’s more responsible fiscal stance. The Senate’s strategy is clear. They want to jam House Republicans with a massive debt-financed tax package with zero substantive offsets. The Senate’s budget resolution replaces the House’s $2 trillion in concrete spending reductions ...
Joe Bishop-Henchmen President Donald Trump joins Presidents John Quincy Adams (1828), John Tyler (1842), Benjamin Harrison (1890), and Herbert Hoover (1930) in enacting a tariff designed not just to raise revenue but to be so high as to insulate sectors of American manufacturing from world competition. While he and others claim that high protective tariffs were a mainstay of past ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Below is an excerpt of the new book Your Body, Your Health Care (Cato Institute 2025) by Jeffrey A. Singer, MD, a senior fellow in Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, a practicing surgeon, and a fellow of the American College of Surgeons. INTRODUCTION As a general surgeon, when patients consult me for health problems and ...
Michael Chapman Frédéric Bastiat (1801–1850) (Image: LefontQ on Wikimedia Commons.) To understand the folly of protectionism, including the use of tariffs, there is perhaps no greater teacher than Frederic Bastiat (1801–1850), a classical liberal economist who fought for economic freedom in 19th-century France. His famous satirical missive, the “Candlemaker’s Petition,” published below, reveals the illogic and self-destructive nature of protectionism ...
Alan Reynolds (Photo: historyonthenet.com) Benjamin M. Anderson was a legendary Austrian economist at Chase National Bank from 1929 to 1939, then a UCLA economist until his death in 1949, the publication year of this remarkable insider’s analysis of US financial and economic history as it happened. Benjamin M. Anderson, Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of ...
Jeffrey A. Singer Today, the Cato Institute is releasing my new book, Your Body, Your Health Care—a defense of your right to make your own health care decisions without government interference. My book examines health care policy through a lens that presumes liberty and autonomy. As adults, we are sovereign individuals with moral agency who possess our bodies. As a ...
Thomas A. Firey The bitter reaction by economists and Wall Street to the Trump administration’s new tariff regime has put a spotlight on one of Donald Trump’s top economic advisers, Peter Navarro. Once a supporter of the mainstream view that foreign exchange is beneficial and trade deficits are unimportant, Navarro shifted radically about 15 years ago, borne by fear of the ...
Chris Edwards President Trump’s anti-market impulses are taking center stage this week with his damaging tariff policies. But the president is occasionally supportive of pro-market reforms, such as his remarks on possibly privatizing the US Postal Service (USPS). A Trump reform push would be welcome because the USPS is an ailing dinosaur in the modern digital economy. The figure below ...
Kyle Handley Recent critiques of international economics may surprise many actual economists. The latest rap against my profession is that we economists were too ideological and optimistic about the benefits of open trade and global markets while ignoring job losses, industrial decline, and economic distress in the United States. One recent op-ed went so far as to suggest trade policymakers do the exact opposite ...