Marriage against the State
I’m pleased to announce the publication of my new Cato Policy Analysis, “Marriage against the State: Toward a New View of Civil Marriage.”
As I note in the introduction, it’s quite rare that Congress ever considers marriage as a policy area in its own right. There are comprehensive health care bills, defense spending bills, farm bills, and civil rights bills, but no really comprehensive marriage bills.
Of course, this might be a good thing, but one of the side effects is that marriage policy can be haphazard in the extreme. Inconsistencies and surprises abound. Marriage influences welfare, immigration, tax law, child custody and support, and many others besides.
Are all of these things legitimate? A popular view among libertarians is that the federal government, and possibly the states, should get out of the marriage business altogether. It’s an approach with much to recommend it, but I can’t entirely agree. For at least some areas of public policy, marriage represents a barrier to government meddling in your financial, family, and intimate life. In these areas, it’s an unqualified good. Marriage is often a defense against the state, and as such, it’s something libertarians ought to want.
Globalization: Curse or Cure?
Globalization holds tremendous promise to improve human welfare but can also cause conflicts and crises. How will competition for resources, employment, and growth shape economic policies among developed nations as they attempt to maintain productivity growth, social protections, and extensive political and cultural freedoms?
In a new study, Cato scholar Jagadeesh Gokhale offers policy recommendations for developed nations to reduce globalization’s negative effects and, indeed, harness it for solving economic challenges.
The New Threats to Free Speech
In a new Policy Analysis, Cato Research Fellow Jason Kuznicki examines the ongoing threats to free speech both at home and around the world, from hate-speech laws in the United Kingdom and Canada and university speech codes in the United States, to the Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam:
The result is not more happiness, but a race to the bottom, in which aggrieved groups compete endlessly with one another for a slice of government power. Philosopher Robert Nozick once observed that utilitarianism is hard-pressed to banish what he termed utility monsters—that is, individuals who take inordinate satisfaction from acts that displease others. Arguing about who hurt whose feelings worse, and about who needs more soothing than whom, seems designed to discover—or create—utility monsters. We must not allow this to happen.
Instead, liberal governments have traditionally relied on a particular bargain, in which freedom of expression is maintained for all, and in which emotional satisfaction is a private pursuit, not a public guarantee. This bargain can extend equally to all people, and it forms the basis for an enduring and diverse society, one in which differences may be aired without fear of reprisal. Although world cultures increasingly mix with one another, and although our powers of expression are greater than ever before, these are not sound reasons to abandon the liberal bargain. Restrictions on free expression do not make societies happier or more tolerant, but instead make them more fractious and censorious.
New Paper: Would a Stricter Fed Policy and Financial Regulation Have Averted the Financial Crisis?
Many commentators have argued that if the Federal Reserve had followed a stricter monetary policy earlier this decade when the housing bubble was forming, and if Congress had not deregulated banking but had imposed tighter financial standards, the housing boom and bust—and the subsequent financial crisis and recession—would have been averted.
In a new study, Cato scholars Jagadeesh Gokhale and Peter Van Doren investigate those claims and dispute them.
New Paper: Why Sustainability Standards for Biofuel Production Make Little Economic Sense
The U.S. sustainability standard currently requires ethanol production to emit at least 20% less CO2 than the gasoline it is assumed to replace. In a new study, authors Harry de Gorter and David R. Just argue that sustainability standards for ethanol are, by definition, illogical and ineffective. Moreover, say de Gorter and Just, those standards divert attention from the contradictions and inefficiencies of ethanol import tariffs, tax credits, mandates, and subsidies, all of which exist whether ethanol is sustainable or not.
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