Search results for ""cato institute,u.s.""

Explains the benefits of free trade and globalization for middle-class, Main Street Americans exposed to a barrage of negative claims from politicians and commentators such as Lou Dobbs.

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Europeans believe that, while the U.S. economy may create more growth, they have it better when it comes to job security, income equality, and other factors. Gersemann, a German reporter went to America, and found that the greater market freedoms in America create a more flexible, adaptable, and prosperous system than the declining welfare states of "old Europe." This book presents statistical data in extensive yet accessible charts and graphs.

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Reflections of a Political Economist collects some of the most incisive and important policy analysis and public choice articles by William A. Niskanen from the last fifteen years. His interests have ranged widely during this time, covering many different areas of public policy, always with an eye toward rigorous economic thinking, fiscal conservatism, and finding shrewd, practical solutions to important problems. In Part I readers will find a discussion of a wide array of policy topics, including taxation, health and retirement funding, terrorism and military preparedness, and corporate governance. These selections bring to the discussion both hard data and theoretical sophistication, making the case for modest, sensible regulations, limited government, and free enterprise. Niskanen rarely lets easy assumptions go unchallenged; one hallmark of his work is to quantify the costs and benefits of a policy and then compare these to the conventional wisdom, which often turns up lacking. In Part II Niskanen turns to public choice, wherein he discusses economic models of various government types, voting, bureaucracy, and constitutional structure. He also reviews several of his recent research interests, including taxation and spending under autocratic, democratic, and optimal governments; European constitutionalism; and various models of bureaucracy and voting. Readers interested in public choice will find more than just summaries of settled questions, however, as Niskanen also discusses several potential research topics in a field that continues to grow. Part III includes a selection of Niskanen's book reviews, in which he considers the works of other notable economists, including Paul Krugman, Mancur Olson, James M. Buchanan, and Alan Greenspan. Part IV offers three more personal reflections, each to some degree removed from economics, but all reflecting Niskanen's thoughtful, understated approach to important issues, wherever he finds them.

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Most federal programs are unnecessary, actively damaging, or properly the responibility of the states or the private sector. This book examines a huge range of programs that should be cut to balance the budget and reduce taxes.

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Most federal programs are unnecessary, actively damaging, or properly the responsibility of the states or the private sector. This book examines a huge range of programs that should be cut to balance the budget and reduce taxes.

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More than a billion people lack access to clean and safe water, causing 12 million deaths a year, as well as widespread poverty and disease. Government monopolies, underinvestment, inappropriate pricing, and insufficient property rights are to blame. Of all water distribution in poor countries, 97 percent is public, but in a few locations privatization and market-oriented reforms have improved the situation. This development has been met with fierce resistance, however. This book shows why the protesters are wrong and how more reforms could save millions of lives and improve the lives of hundreds of millions of others.

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Bilingual Arab/English Constitution and Declaration of Independence

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With the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq, a special task force of scholars and policy experts calls into question the Bush administration's intention to "stay as long as necessary." In this joint statement, the members argue that the presence of troops in Iraq distracts attention from fighting Al Qaeda and emboldens a new class of terrorists to take up arms against the United States. The task force's findings are essential reading for anyone concerned with the ongoing conflict and the war on terrorism.

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Among the issues discussed are the problems of the current system; proposals for the reform; and the impact of reform on the poor, women, and minorities.

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This book explores how regimes that respect property rights including the right to exclude rivals better serve consumers and innovation.

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Machan argues that generosity is an important virtue for citizens of a free society and that it can be cultivated only through freedom.

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A comprehensive documentation of the pervasive influence of global warming alarmism on various aspects of society.

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This past June, the Supreme Court decided a question at the heart of one of America's most impassioned debates, ruling that individual citizens have the constitutional right to possess guns. With that decision, the District's handgun banone of the toughest and most controversial in the nationwas ended. In Gun Control on Trial, journalist Brian Doherty tells the full story behind the landmark District of Columbia v. Heller ruling. With exclusive, behind the scenes access throughout the case, Doherty delved into the issues of this monumental case to provide a compelling look at the inside stories, including: The plaintiffs' fight for the right to protect themselves and their families from violent neighborhoods. The activist lawyers who worked exhaustively to affirm that right. The forces that fought to stop the case, including city officials and the NRA. The story of the Heller case stretches back to long before the decision struck down D.C.'s restrictive gun ban and forward to the future of the political and legal battle over gun control in America. Doherty provides clear, concise explanations of the issues and battles that have driven the gun control debate for decades, detailing how the Heller decision is a new starting point for the gun control debate as it passionately and energetically continues in the years ahead. It's important to note that the Heller decision does not settle every controversy in the gun control debate. It only settles the legal question of whether or not the right to possess weapons under the Second Amendment extends to personal self-defense: it does, writes Doherty. What the Supreme Court decided in Heller may be narrow in its direct and immediate effect; but it's deep in its implications for the relationship between the government and the American people, explains Doherty. It establishes a new shape to the arena in which the legal and political struggle over guns and gun control will be fought. And that fight assuredly continues.

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This book explores one of the most dynamic and exciting aspects of globalization international tax competition. With rising mobility and soaring capital flows, individuals and businesses are gaining freedom to work and invest in nations with lower tax rates. That freedom is pressuring governments to cut taxes on income, investment, and wealth. In Global Tax Revolution, Chris Edwards and Daniel Mitchell chronicle tax reforms around the world in recent decades. They describe the dramatic business tax cuts of Ireland, the flight of successful people from high-tax France, and the introduction of simple flat taxes in more than two dozen nations. Like other aspects of globalization, tax competition is generating intense political opposition. Numerous governments and international organizations are fighting to restrict tax cuts. Edwards and Mitchell challenge those efforts, arguing that tax competition is helping to advance prosperity, expand human rights, and rein in bloated governments. The authors argue that the U.S. economy can be revitalized by embracing competition and overhauling the federal tax code. They discuss how current tax rules suppress wages and investment and describe the tax changes needed for workers and businesses to succeed in the fast-paced global economy. Rather than idly complaining about jobs and capital moving offshore, this book argues that policymakers need to embrace major tax reforms to ensure rising standards of living for Americans in the years ahead.

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Many successful American businesses have been accused of anti-competitive practices. Drawing on 50 years of experience with U.S. antitrust laws, attorney and author Edwin S. Rockefeller sheds light on why lawmakers, bureaucrats, academics, and journalists use arbitrary and irrational laws and enforcement mechanisms to punish capitalists rather than promote competition. The Antitrust Religion argues that everything most people know about antitrust is wrong. The orthodox view is that antitrust was created to protect competition. But Rockefeller's account is strikingly different. He argues that antitrust in practice has often benefited, not the public, but specific businesses that wanted to take down their competitors. In cases ranging from early antitrust targets like Standard Oil to the more recent IBM and Microsoft cases, he reveals why some companies are punished for being winners in the market. Rockefeller vividly shows how antitrust has been transformed into a quasi-religious faith. He explains that this antitrust religion relies on economic theories that bestow a veneer of objectivity and credibility on law enforcement practices that actually rely on hunch and whim. On issues such as mergers and price fixing, Rockefeller thoroughly examines arbitrary antitrust laws that lead to ill-informed juries and bureaucratic abuse. He concludes that those laws also create a perverse incentive for entrepreneurs to hold down sales volume and avoid improvements in price, quality, and service. Otherwise, such entrepreneurs could become the next targets of the antitrust priests. The Antitrust Religion will greatly assist business professionals, journalists, policymakers, professors, judges, and all others interested in government regulation of business in understanding how our antitrust laws actually work.

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Many people believe that globalization and its key components have made matters worse for humanity and the environment. Indur M. Goklany exposes this as a complete myth and challenges people to consider how much worse the world would be without them. Goklany confronts foes of globalization and demonstrates that economic growth, technological change and free trade helped to power a cycle of progress that in the last two centuries enabled unprecedented improvements in every objective measurement of human well-being. His analysis is accompanied by an extensive range of charts, historical data, and statistics. The Improving State of the World represents an important contribution to the environment versus development debate and collects in one volume for the first time the long-term trends in a broad array of the most significant indicators of human and environmental well-being, and their dependence on economic development and technological change. While noting that the record is more complicated on the environmental front, the author shows how innovation, increased affluence and key institutions have combined to address environmental degradation. The author notes that the early stages of development can indeed cause environmental problems, but additional development creates greater wealth allowing societies to create and afford cleaner technologies. Development becomes the solution rather than the problem. He maintains that restricting globalization would therefore hamper further progress in improving human and environmental well-being, and surmounting future environmental or natural resource limits to growth. **Key points from the book** * The rates at which hunger and malnutrition have been decreasing in India since 1950 and in China since 1961 are striking. By 2002 China's food supply had gone up 80%, and India's increased by 50%. Overall, these types of increases in the food supply have reduced chronic undernourishment in developing countries from 37 to 17%, despite an overall 83% growth in their populations. * Economic freedom has increased in 102 of the 113 countries for which data is available for both 1990 and 2000. * Disability in the older population of such developed countries as the U.S., Canada, France, are in decline. In the U.S. for example, the disability rate dropped 1.3 % each year between 1982 and 1994 for persons aged 65 and over. * Between 1970 and the early 2000s, the global illiteracy rated dropped from 46 to 18 percent. * Much of the improvements in the United States for the air and water quality indicators preceded the enactment of stringent national environmental laws as the Clean Air Act of 1970, Clean Water Act of 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. * Between 1897-1902 and 1992-1994, the U.S. retail prices of flour, bacon and potatoes relative to per capita income, dropped by 92, 85, and 82 percent respectively. And, the real global price of food commodities has declined 75% since 1950.

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