I’m not going to talk a lot about the history or positions of the Cato Institute–if you’re interested in that, you can go do the reading yourself.
The very short version is that they are essentially right-wing libertarian types. I’m a bleeding heart left wing socialist type. You’d think we would agree on nothing. You’d be wrong.
While we wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on many domestic social issues, or global economic ones, or really any issue that’s based on empathy or sympathy for other human beings, there are several places where the agendas of right-wing libertarians overlap with crazy lefties. For example, we agree that the Iraq war is a disaster, and that governments are essentially not to be trusted and thus require a very robust set of checks-and-balances on any power assigned to them. (Cato is a strong critic of Bush’s continual expansion of his own powers.) We obviously agree on the importance of civil liberties and rights.
Because the Cato guys are smart guys, even if I think they are often starting from some badly flawed premises, I like to keep an eye on their stuff from time to time and see what they’ve come up with. When we agree, they provide great analysis and I’m happy to reference their information. They also point me to studies I might not have seen.
When we disagree, they do a good job of showing me the argument from the other side. Even when I think the argument is rubbish, or a good argument that starts from incorrect premises, seeing the other side always helps me find weaknesses in my own position. That can only be good.
So, let’s take is established that I think there’s value in reading their stuff, and I recommend you to do the same. Pop over to their blog, pick a category of interest to you in the dropdown and browse some articles. I guarantee you’ll learn something. (Of course, if you do feel anything for other humans, some of the posts will also absolutely enrage you.)
And, to provide an example of the kind of interesting thing you might find, I’ll start with another area where we see eye-to-eye: the need reform drug policies. That agreement leads to an agreement on a lot of things about overpopulation of American prisons as well.
Last year their blog had an interesting post on some figures about America’s ridiculous prison population and its relation to illegal drug policy. Here’s a couple of those facts:
- As of 2005, drug offenders accounted for 55 percent of the federal prison population. About 45 percent of them were in prison for possession, not trafficking.
- Drug offenders have accounted for nearly half the meteoric growth in prison populations since 1995.
- About half the population of U.S. jails and prisons are nonviolent offenders, more than the combined populations of Wyoming and Alaska.
- Forty percent of the more than 1,000 state prisons in the U.S. opened in just the last 25 years. The state of Texas alone has opened an average of 5.7 new prisons each year for the last 21 years. Despite this, about half of federal and state prisons operate over capacity.
- Total U.S. inmates numbered 488,000 in 1985, 1.3 million in 2001, and number 2.2 million today.
There’s also some unsurprising racial bias built in (and yes Will, my first thought was whether these racial statistics are confounded with economic class statistics):
According to federal sentencing guidelines, a man would need to possess 50 times more powder cocaine (preferred by white users) than crack cocaine (preferred by black users) to earn the same prison sentence. Blacks represent about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but 48 percent of the prison population. They represent just 13 percent of drug users, but 38 percent of those arrested for drug crimes, and 59 percent of those convicted. When convicted of the same drug felony, blacks are about 50 percent more likely to be sentenced to prison than whites. A black woman’s chances of spending some time in prison over the course of her life (5.6 percent) is about equal that of a white man (5.9 percent). For black men, the odds are nearly one in three (32.2%).
That post was later followed with another that pointed to a Crooked Timber
Australia, Canada, and the UK, are all English-speaking Western democratic nations that have a very high level of cultural similarity. They all share roughly the same incarceration rate. The United States, another English-speaking Western nation has an incarceration rate more than three times higher than any of the others. A rate higher than Russia (which in popular American stereotype was the evil empire of the Gulag for a long time). What more needs to be said?
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