Cato Event Podcast

America's Longest War is a new documentary from the Reason Foundation about the federal government's 40-year war on drugs. It chronicles the history of drug prohibition from President Nixon's declaration of war in 1971 through President Obama's broken promises on medical marijuana. After more than $1 trillion taxpayer dollars and thousands of paramilitary raids on American homes and drug arrests each year, the prisons are overflowing with drug offenders.Is the drug war working? According to the documentary, drug usage rates have not declined and illegal drugs are more available — and cheaper — than ever before. America's Longest War examines how a policy escalated from a relatively small domestic program that focused on treatment to the multi-billion dollar international war it is today. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Purchase bookHow can America find its way back from economic stagnation, fiscal calamity, and national "malaise"? In his new book, American Conservative Union vice chairman Donald J. Devine argues: the same way it has before, through "a restoration of the constitutional synthesis of freedom and tradition" at the heart of the American experiment.In America's Way Back, Devine makes "the case for 21st century 'fusionism'" — a reinvigoration of the Cold War–era conservative-libertarian alliance that employed "libertarian means for traditionalist ends."But the politics of the new century have strained that alliance significantly. In the gay marriage and immigration debates, conservatives decry libertarians' rejection of "traditionalist ends," while libertarians point to the Bush years as depressing evidence of conservatives' lack of commitment to "libertarian means."Have the differences become too vast to bridge, or can libertarian-leaning Republicans like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Justin Amash breathe new life into post–Cold War fusionism? Join us for what promises to be a lively discussion of these issues. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

After the needless death of his father, business executive David Goldhill began a personal exploration of a health care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. In Catastrophic Care, Goldhill shows the U.S. health care sector is not worth preserving in anything like its current form — and President Obama’s health care law is likely to exacerbate its failings. Goldhill proposes a different and radical solution to these agonizing problems. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Purchase BookIn 2012 the U.S. Supreme Court became the center of the political world. In a dramatic and unexpected 5–4 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts voted to save the Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare. Unprecedented tells the inside story of how this constitutional challenge raced across all three branches of government and narrowly avoided a collision between the Supreme Court and President Obama. The book offers unrivaled inside access to the key decisionmakers in Washington, based on interviews with over 100 of the people who lived this journey — including the academics who began the challenge, the attorneys who litigated the case at all levels (and their allies at Cato and elsewhere), and the Obama administration attorneys who defended the law. It reads like a political thriller, providing the definitive account of how the Supreme Court almost struck down the president's "unprecedented" law. It also explains what this decision means for the future of the Constitution, the limits on federal power, and the Supreme Court. Commenting on this book will be Randy Barnett, who has been called the "intellectual godfather" of the Obamacare constitutional challenge, and Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Purchase BookIn the conventional wisdom, conspiratorial thinking lurks mainly on the fringes of American politics — the "preferred style only of minority movements," as Richard Hofstadter put it in his influential 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In his new book, The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, Jesse Walker begs to differ.Walker insists, contra Hofstadter, that "the Paranoid Style Is American Politics." From the colonial era, through sundry Red Scares, militia scares, and post-9/11 panics, he writes, "the fear of conspiracies has been a potent force across the political spectrum, at the center as well as the extreme." What’s more, some of the most dangerous forms of political paranoia are "the kinds that catch on with people inside the halls of power." Please join us for a lively and timely discussion of political paranoia Right, Left, and Center. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.