Welcome to my personal web site. I've devoted much of my life to trying to eradicate coercion and secure liberty for all and I've learned that while it's a lot of work, it can be personally rewarding, too. I'm presently Vice President for International Programs and a Senior Fellow at the
Cato Institute, as well as director of Cato
University and of the Center for the Promotion of Human Rights. In addition to my work at the Cato Institute, I have served on several board of trustees and currently serve on active advisory boards of a number of other organizations. I frequently lecture in America, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, China, Brazil, and the Middle East on the history of liberty and constitutionalism,
globalization and free trade, individualism, public choice,
and the moral and legal foundations of individual rights. My curriculum vitae and a few of my published writings are available for downloading in the column below. (A couple require fast internet access; either that, or a lot of patience.) To the right are blog entries on whatever seems interesting at the time or strikes my fancy.
"Enterprise and Culture," presentation at conference at the Cato Institute on "What Should Be a Culture of Enterprise in an Age of Globalization?," March 29, 2007
"No Exit: Framing the Problem of Justice," an essay on John Rawls, the social contract, and social justice from from Ordered Anarchy: Jasay and His Surroundings, ed. by Hartmut Kliemt and Hardy Bouillon (London: Ashgate, 2008)
"Freedom Properly Understood", An Address Presented before the Liberal Thinkers’ Conference, “The Future of Freedom,” 60 Years Liberal International, Hamburg, 17 November 2007
"The
Literature of Liberty," from The Libertarian
Reader, edited by David Boaz (New York: The Free Press,
1998)[PDF, 39 pp.]
"Saving
Rights Theory from Its Friends," from Individual
Rights Reconsidered, edited by Tibor Machan (Stanford:
Hoover Institution Press, 2001)
Reprinted from Individual Rights Reconsidered: Are
the Truths of the U.S. Dec laration of Independence
Lasting?, edited by Tibor R. Machan, with the permission
of the publisher, Hoover Institution Press. Copyright
2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford
Junior University.
ï“Do We Need a Government” (Comment on Papers by David Friedman, Birgir Thor Runolfsson, and Boudewijn Bouckaert, delivered
at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting, Reykjavik, August 2005)
"The
Resources of Civil Society," with Steven Scalet
and David Schmidt, Revista Argentina de Teoría
Jurídica de la Universidad Torcuato Di
Tella, Noviembre 1999
"Twenty Myths About Markets," Conference on "The Institutional Framework for Freedom in Africa," Mont Pelerin Society Meeting, Nairobi, February 26, 2007
I was looking for some old articles I’d written in years past and stumbled on this one from The Spectator (of London), which I think was, well, not bad:
“Hothouse of Hate” (not my title), The Spectator, 22. February, 2003
Rep. Ron Paul distanced himself from the ugly remarks in the newsletters published under his name. He says they don’t represent his views and, given that no one has ever reported hearing such ugly words from his own mouth, it seems reasonable to give him the benefit of the doubt on that. But what of the people who eagerly leap to the defense of the newsletter remarks themselves? They can support Ron Paul or they can support the racist remarks attributed to him. Ron made it clear that he thinks that they are indefensible. That should go for the person who wrote those hateful statements and the people who defend them, as well. Ron Paul, by the standards of Mr. Raimondo (“on closer examination, the material that is being called ‘racist’ turns out to be no such thing”), is an arch-evil “cosmotarian”:
Few protested the Kelo ruling more ardently than the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In an amicus brief filed in the case, it argued that “[t]he burden of eminent domain has and will continue to fall disproportionately upon racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and economically disadvantaged.” Unfettered eminent domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a “license for government to coerce individuals on behalf of society’s strongest interests.”
“One can’t imagine how it could happen, how nobody could realize anything of what was going on in the cellar of this house,” Schmitzberger told CNN. “It’s quite unimaginable.”
Write to the Ugandan government to insist on freedom of the press and freedom for Andrew Mwenda, Odobo Bichachi, and John Njoroge, (The Ugandan Embassy can be contacted by mail, email, fax or phone: details here. Please be respectful, but direct, clear, and forceful.)
Schedule, registration information, and scholarship information (for enrolled students), at Cato-University.org.
Rejoice Ngwenya, a leader of the opposition to the brutal policies of President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. He organizes the Zimbabwean Coalition for Market & Liberal Solutions (COMALISO) and is a regular columnist for Cato’s African initiative, AfricanLiberty.org.
Gene Healy, Senior Editor at the Cato Institute, editor of Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Almost Everything and author of the new book The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power.
Professor Robert McDonald, department of history, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and author of the forthcoming book Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson and the Politics of Personality.
Dr. Andrei Illarionov, a senior fellow at Cato’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, who served as chief economic adviser to Russian President Vladimir Putin before resigning publicly at a Kremlin News Conference, saying he could not work for a dictatorship.
Dr. Karen Horn, head of the Berlin office of Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft Köln, a private economic research institute in Germany, and former economics editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of Europe’s leading daily newspapers.
Dr. Peter Van Doren, senior fellow at Cato and editor of the quarterly magazine Regulation.
Me…, senior fellow at Cato and director of Cato’s Center for Promotion of Human Rights, which promotes libertarianism in 11 languages.
Gabriela Calderon, Editor of ElCato.org, Cato’s outreach to the Spanish-speaking world.
Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at Cato, who will address what will be one of the great struggles of the next decade - the fight over socialized medicine.
In today’s New York Times, this interesting story about how one Senator (the presumptive GOP presidential nominee) has done favors for a constituent, “A Developer, His Deals and His Ties to McCain.”
Mr. Diamond, for his part, said Mr. McCain had only done his job. “I think that is what Congress people are supposed to do for constituents,” he said. “When you have a big, significant businessman like myself, why wouldn’t you want to help move things along? What else would they do? They waste so much time with legislation.”
“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.
