Today is a great day for freedom. On this day in 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, thus repealing Prohibition.
Yet, 81 years later, modern-day prohibitionists continue to deny the laws of supply and demand, attempting to control what individuals can choose to put into their own bodies.
Montenegro split off from Serbia a few years ago, after the other Yugoslav republics left Serbia. Montenegro is a country of about 650,000 people with a GDP a bit over $4.6 billion. Its military employs 2,080—1500 in the army, 350 in the navy, and 230 in the air force.
Montenegro is a nice country. But what does it have to do with American security?
After all, 70 years have passed since World War II. The European Union has a larger GDP and population than America, and dramatically larger than Russia. Isn’t it time for Washington’s rich friends and allies to defend themselves? Or will Americans have to wait another 70 years before their government stops spending their money to subsidize Europe’s generous welfare states? And risking their lives because Europe can’t be bothered to put enough of its own men and women into uniform?
Montenegro. A nice place to visit. It doesn’t threaten anyone. It isn’t threatened by anyone. And it doesn’t matter to the U.S. At all.
A Montgomery ordinance required that blacks give up their seats when whites needed seats. In many cases, blacks — especially women — were told to pay their fare at the front of the bus, then leave the bus and re-enter at the back door, only to see the bus drive away.
When bus driver J.F. Blake told Parks to get to the back of the bus, Parks refused to budge. Blake stopped the bus, went to a telephone, and called the police, who summarily escorted Parks to jail.
A woman on the bus got word to E.D. Nixon of the NAACP who, accompanied by white attorney Clifford Dorr, signed bond papers and secured the release of Ms. Parks.
Parks’ act of civil disobedience spurred the creation of the Montgomery Improvement Association, with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as its first president, as well as the famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. Despite violence targeted at them by pro-segregation activists and threats of arrest for drivers who charged bus boycotters less than the government-mandated minimum 45-cent taxi fare, the Montgomery Improvement Association set up a volunteer carpool for getting boycotters to work.
Their efforts were successful: In June 1956, a federal court voted 2-1 to strike down the Montgomery bus segregation ordinance, and later that year the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this decision.
On June 28, 1969, members of New York’s gay community took an unprecedented stand against the New York Police Department’s Morals Division, refusing to silently submit to arrest.
“This time they said, ‘We’re not going,’” said Police Officer Seymour Pine.
The Stonewall riots that resulted are generally regarded as the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States.
To these, of course, one could add many others: the American farmers who fired the shot heard round the world at Concord Bridge, the Gdansk shipyard workers who launched Solidarity in 1980, the Leipzig peace marchers in 1989, Mohammed Bouazizi, a vegetable seller in Tunisia, whom Time magazine dubbed “The Man Who Set Himself and Tunisia on Fire”….
The Cato Institute Instagram account broke 3,000 followers last night (a special thank you to all of followers)!
For more behind the scenes photos of life at a D.C. think tank, follow us!
There’s a tendency for human beings to believe that change comes from the top down. We believe that world leaders or top scientists can make significant changes in the way we live our lives. Author and journalist Matt Ridley challenges this notion in his book, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. He argues that we give too little weight to the bottom-up processes of evolution and that “Evolution is far more common, and far more influential, than most people recognize.”
Join the discussion yourself and RSVP for the upcoming Cato Institute Book Forum!
- What: Book Forum on The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley
- When: November 11, 2015 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
- Where: The Cato Institute: Hayek Auditorium, Washington, DC
Marian L. Tupy of HumanProgress.org will moderate the discussion featuring Matt Ridley and Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey. Attendance is free and there’s a luncheon following the forum.
Click here or email events@cato.org to RSVP. If you can’t make it to the event in-person, you can watch it online at cato.org/live.
If you can’t make it to the event, you can watch it live online at www.cato.org/live and join the conversation on Twitter using#EvolutionofEverything. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute.
Cato’s Libertarianism.org (you can follow them on Tumblr at @libertarianismdotorg) recently launched Libertarianism.org Guides, a series of short videos that make it easy to learn about free, open, and civil societies.
Whether you’re just encountering libertarian ideas for the first time, or want to explore the tradition further but aren’t sure where to start, these guides will help you get your footing.
In the first guide, Introduction to Libertarianism, Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz shares the history and key ideas of libertarianism:
“Some people say libertarians are fiscally conservative and socially liberal, but, in fact, libertarianism is a much deeper idea than that. It’s a radical philosophy– it goes to the root of the relationship between the individual and the state but it is also the foundation of the American Revolution and, indeed, of Western Civilization.”
A recent piece on gun violence and the war on drugs by Cato’s Adam Bates was mentioned in Aspen Institute’s five best ideas of the day!
Bates says, “gun violence related to the drug war kills many more people. If gun control advocates really want to prevent more homicides, it’s not background checks that will get us there. It’s decriminalization of drugs.”
In a recent blog post, George Selgin of Cato’s Center for Monetary Alternatives reviews Ben Bernanke’s new book The Courage to Act.
Selgin starts off by balking at the reactions of the book’s fans, while also giving Bernanke credit for his own more sensible views:
“Is it really possible, I asked myself (as I struggled to keep my gorge from rising), that nobody here takes the moral hazard problem seriously? Do they really suppose that Senators Warren and Vitter and others seeking to limit the Fed’s bailout capacity are doing so because they like financial meltdowns and couldn’t care less if the U.S. economy went to hell in a hand-basket? To his credit, Ben Bernanke does understand the problem of moral hazard. Moreover, he claims, in his long but very readable memoir, to have struggled with it repeatedly over the course of the financial crises. “
While Selgin does poke several holes in Bernanke’s arguments, he is also clear that Bernanke himself cannot be blamed for the Fed’s failures:
“No one knows how to calculate the net present value of present and future financial losses. And who, in the midst of a crisis, would pay attention if someone managed to do it?
And that is why it makes little sense, after all, to blame Ben Bernanke for the Fed’s irresponsible bailouts. Apart from allowing Lehman Brothers to fail, he only did what just about any central banker would have done under the same circumstances. For among that tribe, the courage to act is one thing; the courage to refuse to rescue large, potentially insolvent firms is quite another. And that is why we need laws that make such rescues impossible.”
The Human Freedom Index is the most comprehensive measure of freedom ever created for a large number of countries around the globe.
It captures the degree to which people are free to enjoy major liberties such as freedom of speech, religion, and association and assembly, as well as measures freedom of movement, women’s freedoms, crime and violence, and legal discrimination against same-sex relationships.
The authors of the study also measure the rule of law, which they consider “an essential condition of freedom that protects the individual from coercion.“
Over time, the index could be used to explore the complex ways in which freedom influences, and can be influenced by, political regimes, economic development, and the whole range of indicators of human well-being.
A mere quarter of a century ago Estonia was a very poor backwater on the Baltic Sea that was still under domination of the Soviet Union. But the country’s story is one of remarkable—and improbable—success.
Estonia has been the most successful of the former communist-controlled countries. It is arguably the most advanced country in the world when it comes to use of the Internet and related technologies.
Modern Estonians enjoy the rule of law, the lowest debt-to-GDP ratio in the EU, a balanced budget, free trade, and a flat-rate income tax — all of which have led to their high economic growth and prosperity.
Estonia ranks number 22 out of 152 countries on the Human Freedom Index, number 8 out of 186 economies on the Index of Economic Freedom, and ranked in first place in the Freedom in the World report.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.