Cato Event Podcast

There is a growing consensus that America imprisons too many people.  Americans constitute 5 percent of the world’s population and yet we hold nearly one quarter of its prisoners. In his new book, Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration and How to Achieve Real Reform, law professor John Pfaff argues that the War on Drugs and other federal policies receive outsized attention in the popular movements for criminal justice reform while local institutional actors go virtually unmentioned. According to Pfaff, the charging decisions of local prosecutors have been a key driver of prison growth since the early 1990s. Please join us for a lively discussion about police, prosecutors, sentencing, and our burgeoning prison population. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The 2016 presidential campaign represented a break from the past in many ways, perhaps nowhere more so than in foreign policy. Donald Trump’s insurgent campaign did not draw advisers from the established foreign policy community — the voices that Barack Obama once disparagingly referred to as "the Blob" — and the candidate himself often seemed willing to challenge foreign policy orthodoxy, from NATO spending to U.S. Middle East interventionism.As such, the Trump administration offers a unique opportunity for voices outside the traditional Washington foreign policy community. Thus far, the incoming administration has engaged leaders in the business world and recruited from the military and the corporate sector for key posts. Yet foreign policy and international relations researchers at universities around the country form another untapped pool of expert knowledge on foreign affairs. From grand strategy to cybersecurity, and nuclear posture to democratic stability, political scientists study the key questions animating today’s most important political debates.Join the Bridging the Gap Initiative and the Cato Institute for a discussion of the ways in which international relations scholars and academics can influence policy during the Trump administration. Our panelists will highlight key foreign policy issues facing the new administration and explore how political science research can help to shape the course of the next four years.Join the conversation on Twitter using #CatoFP. Follow @CatoEvents on Twitter to get future event updates, live streams, and videos from the Cato Institute. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

National decline often arises from special interests corrupting a country’s institutions. Such narrow interests include crony capitalists, consumer activists, economic elites, and labor unions. Less attention is given to government insiders — rulers, elected officials, bureaucrats, and public employees. In autocracies and democracies, government insiders have the motive, means, and opportunity to co-opt political power for their benefit and at the expense of national well-being. Many storied empires have succumbed to such inside jobs. Today, they imperil countries as different as China and the United States. Democracy — government by the people — does not ensure government for the people. Understanding how government insiders use their power to subvert the public interest — and how these negative consequences can be mitigated — will be front and center at this intriguing book forum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Third-party payers, private and public, have difficulty restraining healthcare prices, which are typically opaque and all over the place. A new insurance feature — known as “reference pricing” or “reverse deductibles” — has dramatically reduced prices, made prices more transparent to consumers, and spurred consumers to switch to lower-cost providers, all by making consumers cost-conscious. Please join us as we discuss this new innovation and direction in health-care pricing. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Since 1994 public polling has looked at the popularity of many of the existing goals and provisions of Obamacare (like universal coverage and community rating) and has found that these provisions, when decoupled from costs, enjoy majority support among Americans. Yet again, today in 2017, our pollsters have replicated the same pattern but with a twist: what happens if the other side of the equation, the cost, is factored into the question? What happens to public support for the most popular provisions of Obamacare and further, how did this massive transformation of the health insurance markets affect the quality of healthcare people thought they were going to get as a result?Join us as we dig into this new research and take the true measure of public attitudes toward the full implications of this legislation. Furthermore, we’ll examine how mandatory insurance irreparably undermines the very goal of insurance by destroying what Americans want more than anything from health insurance reform: quality healthcare. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What is the proper global role for the United States in the 21st Century? Since World War II, the United States, as the most powerful state, has chosen to be deeply engaged in the world. It has assumed responsibility for global peace and stability, guaranteed the security of dozens of foreign nations, promoted free trade, and posed as the policeman of the world by intervening in distant disputes with little direct relevance for core U.S. interests.The bi-partisan consensus in support of this role has recently shown signs of wear. President Donald Trump criticized it, and won. Public opinion polls for the first time in recent years show significant support for pulling back from this activist foreign policy and pursuing a more modest, less costly approach to the world.In America Abroad: The United States’ Global Role in the 21st Century, Stephen G. Brooks and William C. Wohlforth make a powerful case that America should continue its strategy of deep engagement. But what are the merits of an alternative approach, a grand strategy of restraint? Please join us as we discuss competing ideas about the future of U.S. foreign policy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On March 20 the Supreme Court will finally hear oral arguments in Murr v. Wisconsin, a property rights case it agreed to take up in January 2016. We don’t know why the Court waited almost 14 months to schedule the case for argument and did not wait an additional month — when Judge Gorsuch might be on the Court — but better now than never. Joseph Murr and his siblings own two side-by-side lakeside lots, one with a recreational cabin and the other left vacant as an investment. Due to land-use restrictions, they allege that Wisconsin has “taken” the vacant lot, which would require the state to pay just compensation under the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause. Wisconsin courts rejected this claim by considering the economic use of the two lots combined. The Murr case thus asks how courts should define the “relevant parcel” of land when evaluating regulatory takings. Cato filed a brief in this case, arguing that current regulatory-takings jurisprudence is unclear and puts a thumb on the scale for the government. Another amicus brief, filed by Nevada and eight other states and co-authored by Ilya Somin, argues that the Wisconsin court’s rule “creates significant perverse incentives for both landowners and regulators.” Please join us for a discussion of one of the most important cases of this Supreme Court term on the eve of argument. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia, Samuel Charap (Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia, IISS) and Timothy J. Colton (Morris and Anna Feldberg Professor of Government and Russian Studies and Chair of the Department of Government, Harvard University) examine the roots of the Ukraine crisis, which saw the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, offering a coherent narrative of Western and Russian policies in post-Soviet Eurasia since 1991, and providing a balanced assessment of both Russia and the West’s actions post-2014. The authors argue that all governments involved must recognize the failure of current policies and commit to finding mutually acceptable alternatives. Everyone Loses provides a timely and readable analysis of how we arrived at this dangerous juncture and how we might get out of it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Republicans and Democrats agree that more effort should be made to restore America’s infrastructure. But how should we decide what projects are funded? How much should be spent on new infrastructure and how much on reconstruction? How does funding and finance influence priorities? Should the goal be to create short-term jobs, long-term economic growth, or simply new transportation alternatives?Join four leading transportation experts in a discussion of highways, transit, high-speed rail, airports and air traffic control, and transportation finance. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Can states that possess nuclear weapons better coerce adversaries than states without nuclear weapons? In Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy, Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann argue that the empirical record undermines the case that nuclear weapons are a useful coercive tool. They show that states with nuclear weapons don’t have more leverage in settling territorial disputes, they don’t initiate military challenges more often, they are not more likely to escalate ongoing disputes, they are not more likely to blackmail rivals, and they are just as likely as nonnuclear states to make concessions in high-stakes confrontations.This is not to say nuclear weapons are unimportant. They are extremely useful for deterrence. But it turns out they don’t enable states to get their way with ease.These findings have important implications for foreign policy and our understanding of complex issues ranging from Iran and North Korea, to the prospect of conflict in the South China Sea, to America’s own approach to the world.Please join us for this timely and provocative discussion. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.