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Forbes
Shutdowns Aren’t The Problem, They’re The Solution
Federal shutdowns—along with the debt limit like that the Republicans sought to extend in the American Relief Act (ARA)—may represent the last remaining…
Blog
Time to downsize presidential power
Over at InsideSources, I have a syndicated column arguing that the presidency has grown too powerful. The best parting gift President Biden could give…
The American Spectator
Regulations’ Enormous Costs and DOGE’s Enormous Upside
The American Spectator cited CEI’s Ten Thousand Commandments Wayne Crews, author of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s “Ten Thousand Commandments” study, produced a price tag that…
Search Posts
Forbes
Can Silicon Valley Sic Schumpeterian Disruption On Bloated City Governments?
It’s one thing to ship your tax money off to Washington, resigned to the fact that you have little control over the distant bureaucracy that…
Forbes
The Way It Was Under Walter Cronkite: We Were Starved For Media
“And that’s the way it is,” intoned Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America,” at the end of each news broadcast. It seems…
Forbes
Acton Academy: Socrates’ Antidote for Government School Hemlock
Only someone in deep denial, or in total thrall to teachers’ union propaganda, believes our inner city public schools are anything more than dropout factories.
Forbes
10 Ways To Dodge The Mess We Baby Boomers Are Leaving The Millennials
The Greatest Generation bequeathed Baby Boomers a nation on the rise. After saving Western Civilization from fascism, they rebuilt a war-torn world, powered an economic…
Forbes
White House Income Equality Agenda Makes War On Progress
In tonight’s State of the Union Address, Mr. Obama will attempt to shake off the most disastrous year of his presidency by doubling down on…
Forbes
The Antigua Forum: Exporting A Different Kind of Latin American Revolution
Call it the “Free Market Davos.” The Antigua Forum, sponsored by Universidad Francisco Marroquín, in Guatemala, finished its third annual conference last week. For three…
Forbes
Anatomy of an NPR Hatchet Job, Target: Oil & Gas
“On-The-Job Deaths Spiking As Oil Drilling Quickly Expands” screams a supposed National Public Radio exposé on the “terrible price” we’re paying for the fracking…
Forbes
2013: The Year The Progressive Narrative Collided With Reality
When it comes to crafting winning political narratives, progressives have a natural advantage over conservatives. That’s because progressives have a free hand to project rosy…
Forbes
Obama to Health Insurance Companies: Merry Christmas. Now, Drop Dead.
Insurance is a complicated product. Even President Obama figured that out. Hundreds of highly trained actuaries spend thousands of hours assembling risk pools to determine premium levels,…
The American Spectator
Santa Capitalism
We should call it the “Great Fact,” argues University of Illinois at Chicago economist Deirdre McCloskey. “It” is the Industrial Revolution that, starting in Great…
Human Events
23 and Me for You and Me
My son’s birth is among my most treasured memories. I knew immediately his arrival had transformed my life. But, the joy of that memory comes…
Human Events
The Battle of Two Hedgehogs
As it happened, Simon won the bet. Because of his victory, he became a conservative hero. He died in 1998, but he continues to be…
Forbes
The Knockout Game Goes Viral, The Hunger Games It’s Not
Enthralled with the movie saga of starving and oppressed young heroes rebelling against brutal government tyranny? Then what do you make of gangs of inner-city…
Forbes
Battling For The Heart And Soul Of America’s Political Parties
To our progressive friends, it seemed like a century of advocating for government-sponsored universal health care reached fruition when the Affordable Care Act became the law…
Forbes
Why Obama’s Healthcare.gov Will Never Work As Specified
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Thus answered the HAL 9000 computer in the classic Stanley Kubrick movie 2001: A Space…
Human Events
Obama, Father of all Czars
Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution states: No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States[.] But when George…
Human Events
Obama’s Brinkmanship
We all remember the term “brinkmanship” from the Cold War, coined by President Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In an interview in Life…
Forbes
Is Eric Holder Playing Don Corleone To Jamie Dimon’s Bonasera?
As Don Corleone said to Bonasera in The Godfather’s iconic opening scene, “Some day, and that day may never come, I’ll ask a service of you.” For…
Forbes
The Land Of The Free Is Now A Nation Of Sheep, Wolves, Pigs And Sloths
No, this is not another diatribe about the futility of many gun control laws and the geographic correlation between the level of gun crime and…
Human Events
In Name Only
Traipsing through Dulles Airport the other day, my eyes were drawn to a series of wall poster advertisements. Each one featured a supposed “foreign aid…
Human Events
Converting the Unconvertible
Here’s a thought experiment: What words come to mind with the following statements? I grew up in Marin County, Calif., during the late 1960s and…
Human Events
No Bipartisanship, Please
We’ve heard it a million times: What Washington needs is more bipartisanship, more cooperation among the parties … like the old days. To which I…
Forbes
President Obama’s ‘Syrialoquy’: To Bomb, Or Not To Bomb
To bomb, or not to bomb, that is the suggestion; Whether ’tis nobler in the polls to suffer The Slings and Arrows of…
Forbes
Betting on the Apocalypse
ONE day in October 1990, the iconoclastic economist Julian L. Simon walked out to get the mail at his house in the Washington suburb of…
News Release
Ronald Coase Dies at 102; CEI Releases Interview Footage of the Nobel-Winning Economist
WASHINGTON, D.C., September 3, 2013 – Ronald Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel prize in economics for his work on transaction costs and property rights,…
Forbes
Ronald Coase Was The Greatest Of The Many Great University Of Chicago Economists
Ronald Coase (1910-2013), the greatest of the Chicago School economists in my view, died this week. Yet, his work lives on. If it gains the…
National Review
The Pinnacle of Rent-Seeking
In this post, Hans Bader of CEI explains how Georgetown Law School has figured out how to maximize its haul of federal-financial-aid money. You’ve almost…
Forbes
We’re In A Cultural War Between The Forces Of Economic Dynamism And Stasis
In a recent column, I noted that our tribal ancestors viewed entrepreneurs with suspicion. In their view, entrepreneurs were too willing to violate…
Forbes
The Founders’ Greatest Fears About Democracy Are Playing Out
Our Founders’ greatest fear that pure democracy would inevitably destroy itself is being played out in two distinct dramas, both headed toward the same ending.
Forbes
Want To Revive Glass-Steagall? Try This Wall Of Separation Instead
A debate is raging on the left, the right, and even in libertarian circles on the best way to escape from the Too-Big-To-Fail quagmire. But…
Forbes
Charles Dickens’ Ebenezer Scrooge Was The Ultimate Job Creator
There is probably no figure more emblematic of the greedy, penny-pinching capitalist than Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Dickens is often seen…
Forbes
Can Post-Constitutional America Recover Its Freedom And Prosperity?
It is by now undeniable that our Constitution is being unwound at an accelerating rate. With the wave of a blog post, the President of…
Washington Times
Approaching economic stall speed
Government regulations not justified on a cost-benefit basis, plus the cumulative weight of all regulations, result in a dead-weight loss to an economy. The United…
Forbes
The Great Obamacare Intergenerational Swindle
In the sci-fi thriller The Hunger Games, a group of young people are made to compete against each other in a fight for survival. Post-Constitutional America…
Forbes
‘Racist’ Massachusetts Voters Defeat A Hispanic Republican Senatorial Candidate
Pretty offensive headline, isn’t it? Baselessly ascribing racist motives to voters for choosing Caucasian Rep. Ed Markey over Latino challenger Gabriel Gomez in this week’s…
Forbes
Coming Soon: A Dramatic Downshift In Company Size, Plus Hours Worked
The regulatory state never sleeps, relentlessly working day and night to tilt the economic playing field in favor of the politically connected. The regulations it…
News Release
Scholar Awarded Julian L. Simon Memorial Award for Moral, Historical Defense of Freedom
WASHINGTON, D.C., June 13, 2013 – CEI is pleased to announce that Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication, at the…
Forbes
Once The Obama Narrative Implodes, Reality Breaks Through
Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of…
Forbes
Consternated Conferences
The conservative movement’s factions also pushed back against the often puzzling decisions of the American Conservative Union board, which controls CPAC. The gay conservative group…
Forbes
The Sad Decline of the Word Capitalism
Not everyone is giving up. One example is Fred L. Smith, chairman and founder of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who has launched the…
Forbes
Privatize almost everything
Finally, if you are having trouble with the quiz at the beginning, you might wish to go the websites of major free-market think tanks, such…
Forbes
Poverty Professionals And The Crony Capitalists Who Love Them
Yes, it looks like a wedding announcement out of The Onion, but when it comes to making a killing off the never-ending “War on Poverty,”…
Forbes
When Steven Pearlstein Bashes Capitalism, Is It Really Capitalism?
Washington Post columnist Steven Pearlstein recently touched on several important tensions that arise in our conceptions of capitalism—tensions that lie at the core of America’s…
Forbes
We Can’t Save Capitalism Unless We Denounce Its False Prophets
A debate is raging among free market advocates regarding the proper posture to take with respect to Too Big to Fail (TBTF) banks. This has…
Cato
Public Choice and Political Advocacy
In the three decades since I founded the Competitive Enterprise Institute, I have seen the pro–free market intellectual movement grow by…
Cato
Slowly, GOP shifting on same-sex marriage
The final safe haven within the conservative movement for anti-gay bigotry — the American Conservative Union’s CPAC convention, held last week in Maryland — received…
Cato
Conservative case for gay marriage
In more signs of change, the organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference were widely criticized by mainstream conservatives for excluding pro-gay organizations from this…
Cato
GOP not wedded to views on gays
And at the Conservative Political Action Committee convention, a panel sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute drew a large and approving crowd for a discussion…
Cato
CPAC stars: Ten Republicans to watch (whether you love or loathe them)
CPAC organisers denied GOProud a booth at this year’s event. But the Competitive Enterprise Institute used its position as a CPAC sponsor, which gave it…
The Guardian
CPAC 2013: An angry and beaten US right fires out scattergun wacky policies in hunt for victory
CPAC embraced Trump but did not invite gay Republicans, with their GOProud organisation reduced to a single speaker on…
Staff & Scholars
Clyde Wayne Crews
Fred L. Smith Fellow in Regulatory Studies
- Business and Government
- Consumer Freedom
- Deregulation
Richard Morrison
Senior Fellow
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Capitalism and Free Enterprise
Fred L. Smith, Jr.
Founder; Chairman Emeritus
- Automobiles and Roads
- Aviation
- Business and Government
Ryan Young
Senior Economist
- Antitrust
- Business and Government
- Regulatory Reform