May 16, 2015
William Hastings Burke, historian and author of Thirty Four, shares the story of Albert Goering, the younger brother of Hitler’s top aid Field Marshall Herman Goering, who courageously and repeatedly defied the Nazi regime to save many lives during the Second World War.
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May 16, 2015
Charles Murray, W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, explains his radical proposal. Murray calls for mass civil disobedience to quell today’s overzealous administrative, regulatory state, in order to encourage a more tempered, “no harm, no foul” enforcement practice.
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May 12, 2015
Conflict, consternation, and litigation has spread across college campuses ever since a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the Obama administration’s Office of Civil Rights launched a vast expansion of the Title IX bureaucracy. This Nixon-era law originally focused on banning relics of the past, such as male-only vocational education, but later was expanded by federal bureaucrats to enforce gender equity in college athletics, leading to de facto quotas. Since then, it has accreted new powers not because new powers were conferred by an act of Congress, but because executive branch administrators decided to reinterpret this 43-year-old statute to advance their political agenda.
The result? A flurry of lawsuits, breakdown of due process, and hastily established campus tribunals to adjudicate allegations of sexual assault and other crimes traditionally handled by the criminal justice system. Undeterred by this unfolding disaster in higher education, the Department of Education, via a new “Dear Colleague” letter, is now warning K-12 public school administrators that their federal funding will be at risk if they don’t embark on a similar course.
Few items of local politics are as explosive as school board politics. Watch for the reaction as the Title IX juggernaut comes to an elementary school near you.
To read the rest of the column click here.
May 9, 2015
Bill Draper, one of the first Silicon Valley venture capitalists and author of The Startup Game, shares stories from his early days in the valley and assesses today’s opportunities for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs.
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May 9, 2015
Bruce Yandle, professor of economics at George Mason University, dean emeritus of the Clemson College of Business and Behavioral Sciences, and former executive director of the Federal Trade Commission, explains his “Baptist and Bootlegger” theory of regulation. Yandle describes how these odd-bedfellow coalitions encourage regulatory cartels.
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May 2, 2015
Lance Freeman, Professor in Columbia University’s Urban Planning program, separates fact from fiction in the gentrification debate and discusses the surprising response he found when researching two inner city New York City neighborhoods for his book, There Goes the ‘Hood.
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Benjamin Powell, Director and Professor of Economics at Texas Tech University and author of Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, defends so-called sweatshops as the least bad option for individuals trying to escape extreme poverty and a stepping stone for countries seeking to jump start economic development. Powell recommends conscientious shoppers unreservedly buy products from poor countries so that they, too, can follow the path of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.
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April 25, 2015
Nuala O’Connor, President and CEO of the Center for Democracy & Technology, discusses the threats to digital privacy from government agencies demanding greater access to our data for reasons ranging from safety and security to fairness. Rather than take government assurances at face value, O’Connor believes technology, specifically the “Internet of people,” offers a better solution to online threats.
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Randy Barnett, Professor of Legal Theory and Director of the Center for the Constitution at Georgetown Law, pits the two prevailing interpretations of the Constitution against one another—majoritarian protection of the collective will vs. sovereign individual rights. On privacy issues, Barnett discusses his wariness of mission creep and possible future government abuses of data.
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April 18, 2015
Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, discusses his new book, End the IRS Before It ends Us: How to Restore a Low Tax, High Growth, Wealthy America, and argues that the Obama campaign sicced the IRS on the Tea Party groups to influence the 2012 election. He also addresses the crucial question: What size tax burden is necessary for effective government?
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April 18, 2015
General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA and the NSA and current Principal at the Chertoff Group, weighs privacy concerns and national security decisions. Hayden argues that American success to date in stopping the proliferation of terror has made many people complacent, encouraging them to denounce blanket data collection.
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I was first introduced to the concept of a Protected Class, and the power of Affirmative Action, as a young engineer at Bell Labs in the late 1970s. Not long before I joined the company, AT&T signed a consent decree with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that obligated the country’s then-largest private employer to hit specific goals and timetables for hiring women in traditionally male jobs, men in traditionally female jobs, and minorities in jobs in which they had been traditionally underrepresented. This consent decree became a template for subsequent Affirmative Action programs that exist to this day in employment, education, housing, banking, and other sectors of our economy.
To get the largely white male engineers at Bell Labs to accommodate themselves to the program, the company required us to attend what became known as “white male guilt sessions,” where a paid professional activist would berate us for our sins. Not our sins, actually — after all, most of us were fresh out of school — but past sins of people who looked like us, not against the women and minorities employed alongside us, but against people who looked like them in days gone by.
To read the rest of the column click here.
April 11, 2015
Cornelia Meyer, independent economist, energy expert, and Chairman and CEO of MRL Corporation, assesses the European Union’s challenges of governance and prescribes fiscal policy alignment and deeper coordination and control across the EU to avoid the risk of sovereign defaults.
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Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England and author of Inventing Freedom: How the English-Speaking Peoples Made the Modern World, traces the first incarnation of society based on the consent of the governed—built on a foundation of ordered liberty, individual autonomy, and common law as opposed to state-led control.
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President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry, with the cooperation of the mainstream media, are attempting to pull off a coup. No, not against Congress, but against reality. Headlines blare “Iran Agrees to Detailed Nuclear Outline” and “Iran Nuclear Deal Is First Step to Mending Ties.”
Wait a minute. What deal?
Where is the signed piece of paper – any signed piece of paper – upon which all the negotiators have placed their signatures under the same words, English and Farsi translations side by side? You can read dozens of news reports and analyses, but figuring out that such a signed document does not exist is like finding the dog that didn’t bark.
To read the rest of the column click here.
April 4, 2015
Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), discusses his recent e-book, Was Jesus a Socialist?, and the political philosophy of bible parables, including the golden rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
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Dr. Samuel Gregg, the Acton Institute’s director of research, discusses the relationship between economic and religious liberty and the belief in building a type of world that prefigures the Christian idea of the next life.
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It’s a place of unchecked executive authority and mind numbing regulations run amok. No, I’m not talking about Washington, but your typical modern university campus. College costs more than ever and students and parents increasingly fret whether they’re getting their money’s worth. But there’s one area in which American colleges are excelling: banishing certain ideas from public debate.
A generation ago, college students marched demanding freedom of speech. Now many of those old campus radicals have become administrators and are demanding freedom from speech, including ”microaggression” reporting services designed to cleanse the English language of any locution that might offend. Didn’t George Orwell warn us about this?
How does stamping out unpopular ideas prepare someone for life after college? How are students supposed to go out into the world, unleash creative destruction upon obsolete businesses and industries, and take on the challenges of adulthood if they spend their early lives covered in protective gear? Innovation comes from challenging the status quo, not kowtowing to it.
To read the rest of the column click here.
March 28, 2015
David Malpass, former White House economist and president of Encima Global, appraises monetary policy at home and abroad, contrasting the discipline of the market with central bank control. Malpass’s optimism extends to Greece, for which he recommends lowering the country’s value added tax, downsizing the military, and selling government assets to encourage economic growth.
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March 28, 2015
Nikola Poposki, Macedonia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, tells of his country’s emergence from the former Yugoslavia into a peaceful, prosperous republic with aspirations to join NATO and the European Union, thanks in large part to the implementation of sound pro-growth policies like a 10 percent flat income tax.
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March 21, 2015
Thomas Miller, Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute discusses what’s at stake in the Supreme Court Obamacare case, King v. Burwell, and its possible effects on health care and the rule of law.
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March 21, 2015
Carrie Severino, chief counsel and policy director of Judicial Crisis Network, analyzes the oral arguments heard by the Supreme Court in King v. Burwell on March 4. At issue is the statutory interpretation of the text of the Affordable Care Act in which subsidies are only allotted to exchanges “established by the state.”
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March 14, 2015
Yaron Brook, Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute, discusses ARI’s educational outreach, his analysis of the Republican presidential field, and what he sees from the growing ranks of young people around the world interested in Rand’s philosophy and capitalism.
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March 14, 2015
Paul Van Remortel, product developer and spokesman for StandUnited.org, discusses his organization’s new online petition platform, aimed at empowering conservatives to take action.
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March 14, 2015
Erik Telford, President of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, talks about the transformational change in media today, caused largely by the decline of legacy media’s outdated business model, combined with the growing power of the many, varied voices online. Franklin Center’s Watchdog.org is contributing to the conversation with state-based investigative reporters exposing government abuse of power.
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March 14, 2015
Brian Calle, Senior Fellow at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, tells how he escaped a failing public school system in Chino, California, to become a passionate advocate for infusing competition into education. Calle believes Republicans could galvanize crossover and swing voters by better engaging on the issue.
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March 7, 2015
Former New Mexico Governor Johnson, now Honorary Chairman Our America Initiative and CEO of hi, discusses his own divergence from the Republican party on drug policy, marriage equality, immigration, and foreign policy, among other issues, and how he continues to stay active in the political debate outside the two-party system.
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March 7, 2015
Executive Director John Pappas discusses the Poker Players Alliance’s current campaign to stop the proposed online gambling ban, which is being pushed forward by special interests, namely casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.
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March 7, 2015
Heather Higgins, Independent Women’s Forum Chairman and Independent Women’s Voice President, speaks out against Democratic politicians’ tired “war on women” campaign and shares examples of IWF & IWV’s effective campaigns encouraging free market policies—from assisting Scott Brown’s election to the Senate to challenging Obamacare in the Supreme Court.
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March 7, 2015
Executive Director Gregory Angelo recounts the beginnings of Log Cabin Republicans in 1977, inspired by Ronald Reagan’s opposition to Proposition 6, the Briggs Initiative—an anti-gay propaganda law similar to Russia’s laws today.
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February 28, 2015
Marquette University professor John McAdams, whose tenure is threatened as a result of his outspoken politically incorrect blogging, discusses the speech infringements of his experience and across campuses nationwide.
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February 28, 2015
Harvard professor, feminist, and retired federal judge Nancy Gertner speaks out against overzealous enforcement of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and the challenge of defining rape and sexual assault due to ambiguities regarding consent, impairment, and differences between the sexes.
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February 21, 2015
Dr. Richard Swart of Crowdfund Capital Advisors and Director of Research at the University of California-Berkeley’s Fung Institute, discusses the history of social capital and crowdfunding. Swart recounts the entrepreneurial beginnings of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act and makes the case for extending privileges now offered only to officially designated accredited investors—those with $1 million or more to invest.
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February 21, 2015
John Tamny, editor of RealClearMarkets and of Political Economy at Forbes, discusses the challenges of using fiat money as a measurement tool. Tamny explores what oil shocks reveal about the floating dollar by comparing the more stable relationship between oil and gold.
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February 14, 2015
David Boaz, Cato Institute Executive Vice President discusses The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom, an update to his classic Libertarianism: A Primer, out this week. Boaz succinctly describes the oft-misunderstood classical liberal philosophy of personal and economic freedom on the rise culturally.
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February 14, 2015
Daniel DiSalvo, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and assistant professor at City College of New York, discusses his recently published Government against Itself: Public Union Power and its Consequences. DiSalvo describes the oft-ignored dichotomy between public unions and traditional democratic values. To illustrate, he points to the $3.2 trillion in unfunded pension liabilities increasingly crowding out government services.
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By Bill Frezza
“Who owns a telephone?”
It’s a question I frequently ask when I speak on college campuses about impediments to innovation. Every hand goes up, and I get quizzical looks as if I just asked who was wearing clothes.
“Who knows that when I was a kid, it was illegal to own your own telephone?”
A couple of graying professors raise their hands, recalling the days when you had to rent your phone from Ma Bell, the only legal provider.
“Hitchhiking back to college after a weekend break, why did I call my mom, ring the phone three times, and hang up to let her know I got back safely?” More quizzical looks. “Because in 1972 a three-minute long distance call cost the same as two pitchers of beer and three bags of Beer Nuts.”
I have their attention.
From the time my father was born in the 1920s to the time I went to college in the 1970s, the consumer experience of telephone service barely changed. You could have plugged a 1920s telephone into the 1970s telephone network and it would have worked just fine.
Sure, there were a few changes. Long distance operators were replaced by direct dialing. Push-buttons supplanted the old rotary dial. Other than that, the experience of making a telephone call barely changed for 50 years. Fifty years! New features? Hey, the Princess Phone has a lighted dial! As for consumers enjoying a Moore’s Law decline in prices? Fuggedaboudit.
I ask, “How many of you think the smartphone you are carrying is still going to be supported 50 years from now?” They laugh. “How would you like it you weren’t allowed to have new features until everyone on the planet gets a phone?” Eyes roll.
I tell them about a paper that was published in the late 1970s—when I had my first job as an engineer at Bell Laboratories—that explained why you could never send data down a telephone line at a rate faster than 9,600 bits per second. More quizzical looks from generation broadband. You’re putting us on, right?
This is where connecting the past to different possible futures gets interesting.
An entire generation has grown up with no knowledge of what it was like to live under the government sanctioned telecom monopoly known as the Bell System. Today, we have choices unimaginable during that 50-year era. So why did stasis last so long?
The answer is the number one killer of innovation—government-enforced “fairness.”
To read the rest of the column click here.
February 7, 2015
Emmanuel Martin, Executive Director of the Institute for Economic Studies, comments on Paris in the month since the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. From an immigrant family himself, Martin blames France’s prohibitive regulations for many Muslims’ lack of cultural assimilation and their near-coercion into the welfare state and immigrant ghettos.
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February 7, 2015
Chris Hernandez, former Marine, police officer, and author, provides perspective on trauma. Hernandez dismisses the “new trauma” of microaggressions and trigger warnings compared to the vital decision-making required in real conflict situations, from Ferguson, Missouri, to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Germany Must Decide: When and How Will Greece Leave the Euro?
By Bill Frezza
After years of self-delusion, European central planners are being gobsmacked by reality. When you clear away the fog spewed by the traveling circus of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, two crucial questions need to be answered. First, will Greece be ejected from the euro now or later? Second, will the Grexit be orderly or disorderly? Everything else is narrative management.
For their part, the Greek people have spoken. By electing Syriza they’ve made it clear that they not only refuse to consider the one thing that could save their economy–which is to repeal job-killing labor regulations and licensing laws–but they won’t even tolerate pretend reforms. Greeks, proud as they are, would rather all starve than allow the country’s few remaining entrepreneurs to get the economy moving again by starting businesses without having to stuff bureaucrats’ pockets full of fakelaki.
If one principle informs the communist professors who now occupy the Greek cabinet, it is Lenin’s maxim that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Varoufakis recently proposed to exchange outstanding Greek debt for perpetual bonds with no maturity date and payment schedules tied to future growth. This scheme is as brilliant as it is laughable. In effect, Varoufakis is telling creditors that if they want to go on as before in order to avoid recognizing their losses, he is happy to spend their money rehiring armies of do-nothing Greek civil servants. And, oh, how about a bridge loan so we can work out the details?
If you don’t back me up, he threatens—pause for dramatic effect—“When I return home tonight I will find a country where the third-largest party is not a neo-Nazi party, but a Nazi party.”
To read the rest of the column click here.
San Francisco area friends—we’re holding a launch party next Wednesday February 11th and would love to see you there! Email Amanda.France@cei.org for details if you haven’t already RSVP’d.
And be sure to tune in tomorrow, February 7th, to RealClear Radio Hour with Bill Frezza and guests Chris Hernandez and Emmanuel Martin discussing “New Trauma” and Charlie Hebdo.
You can listen live Saturdays at 1pm or 7pm ET on Bloomberg’s Boston iHeartRadio or at 10am or 4pm PT on Bloomberg’s San Francisco iHeartRadio.
Weaponizing Trauma
Chris Hernandez, former Marine, police officer, and author, provides perspective on trauma. Hernandez dismisses the “new trauma” of microaggressions and trigger warnings compared to the vital decision-making required in real conflict situations, from Ferguson, Missouri, to the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Paris in the Wake of Charlie Hebdo
Emmanuel Martin, Executive Director of the Institute for Economic Studies, comments on Paris in the month since the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. From an immigrant family himself, Martin blames France’s prohibitive regulations for many Muslims’ lack of cultural assimilation and their near-coercion into the welfare state and immigrant ghettoes.
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JAN 31, 2015
Sugata Mitra, Newcastle University Professor and designer of The School in the Cloud, discusses how he seeks to reinvent 21st century education. Starting with his Hole-in-the-Wall experiments, the inspiration for Slumdog Millionaire, Mitra has created havens for self-organized learning across India and the United Kingdom.
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JAN 31, 2015
Reshma Singh, Executive Director of the Partnership for Educational Justice (PEJ), tells how century-old tenure laws give ironclad job security to teachers, regardless of performance, at the cost of children’s education and rights. Many teachers and states are pushing for reform similar to the lawsuit PEJ has undertaken, representing nine New York families advocating for tenure reform as an important tool for improving failing schools.
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Why does the United States insist on exporting violence to developing countries? Is it because our politicians pay little price for the human toll exacted by our failed social policies? Some 5.5 million American consumers seem determined to satisfy their appetite for cocaine regardless of the law, according to the 2014 UN World Drug Report. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of our 535 Members of Congress continue to believe they can end that market by doubling down on a war on drugs that includes sending heavy weapons and billions of dollars to client governments—many of them corrupt—to kill the people working to meet that demand.
Human Rights Watch estimates that 200,000 Colombians have died in drug war related violence. 60,000 have died in Mexico in the last eight years alone, a transit country our policies have transformed into a war zone. Perhaps the carnage could be justified if the four decades long war on drugs was working to protect Americans from the folly of their own consumption choices. But there is no evidence for this. Year after year we fill our jails, Colombians fill their graves, and nothing seems to change. America’s entrenched duopoly political system seems hell-bent on continuing—and even escalating—this failed war.
Thankfully, some of its victims are beginning to take matters into their own hands, seeking to opt out of the battle. ¡Verdad! (Spanish for “truth”) is a coalition of Colombian citizens working together to end the violence created by the drug war in Colombia. I had a chance to interview its soft-spoken founder, Daniel Raisbeck, at the recent 2015 Antigua Forum in Guatemala. (You can listen to the interview on YouTube here or download it from iTunes here.)
To read the rest of the column, click here.
January 24, 2015
Wayne Leighton, Professor at Universidad Francisco Marroquin and Executive Director of the Antigua Forum, takes a break from his yearly conference to discuss the founding of UFM and the beginnings of this global activist/scholar conclave. The mission of both institutions is to train future generations to promote a free and ethical society.
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January 24, 2015
Daniel Raisbeck, Director Archivo Historico at Universidad del Rosario and founder of ¡Verdad!, discusses his Colombian heritage and what led him to organizing a coalition of citizens to end drug war violence. To Raisbeck, Colombia has come a long way from Pablo Escobar’s “bullets or money” culture and there are now opportunities for peacefully ending drug prohibition and its accompanying violence.
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January 17, 2015
Peter Pomerantsev, British TV producer and author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, describes Vladimir Putin’s artistic approach to propaganda and authoritarian rule. From Putin’s immediate takeover of television and scripting of news to corporate raids and the “war” with America that originally existed only in Russian news, Pomerantsev depicts a Russian twilight zone.
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January 17, 2015
Garry Kasparov, global human rights activist, former world chess champion, Chairman of the United Civil Front, and part of The Other Russia coalition, speaks out against Vladimir Putin’s increasingly authoritarian rule. Kasparov discusses the global implications of Putin’s poisonous presidency and America’s lack of leadership in response.
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January 10, 2015
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, weighs in on the minimum wage debate, the ill-effect on low skilled workers, and unions’ growing involvement in minimum wage politics in the fast food industry.
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January 10, 2015
Peter Wallison, American Enterprise Institute scholar and author of Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again, debunks the narrative blaming the 2007-2008 financial crisis on deregulation, and explains why affordable housing policies and subprime loan incentives drove Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into insolvency, taking the rest of the financial industry down with them.
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Two conflicting narratives are dueling for the people’s favor trying to influence the direction in which our democracy swings next.
The prevailing narrative — promoted by incumbent politicians, government bureaucrats, finance industry insiders, and the mainstream media — can be summed up by its time-tested theme song: Happy days are here again! Bold action by our leaders, so the story goes, rescued the global financial system from the ravages of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, a meltdown caused by capitalist greed and foolhardy deregulation. The corporate bailouts were absolutely necessary to save bank depositors, defrauded homeowners, and unionized auto workers — and have been repaid to boot, demonstrating their soundness.
Further evidence that the Keynesian medicine of monetary expansion and fiscal stimulus worked is that the stock market is at an all time high, economic growth topped 5 percent last quarter, and unemployment is back down under 6 percent. Banks are sounder than ever thanks to the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, which spawned thousands of pages of new regulations designed to make sure what happened before never happens again. And inflation is so tame that central bankers must drive it higher in order to save us from the deflationary monster. All good citizens need to do is place their trust with the experts who run our economy, then go out and spend, spend, spend to boost aggregate demand.
The opposing narrative, consigned to the realm of conspiracy theorists and libertarian cranks, is that the Keynesian money-printing orgy has merely papered over the latest in a long string of financial industry debacles. Rather than brining lasting prosperity, this has planted the seeds for a subsequent crisis that will be worse than the last, which itself was worse than the one before that, namely the Savings and Loan meltdown of the late 1980s and early 90s. The soaring stock market is not based on growing economic strength but is, rather, a reflection of an unsustainable asset bubble.
This true state of affairs is obscured because government unemployment and GDP statistics have become politically-driven fabrications. And our too-big-to-fail banks remain vulnerable to a collapse in liquidity when the hyper-hypothecation chains supporting the $600 trillion derivatives pyramid snap under the next black swan event.
To read the rest of the column click here.
January 3, 2015
Martin Hutchinson, former international merchant banker, author of Alchemists of Loss and the weekly column The Bear’s Lair, gives a global financial rundown. Hutchinson predicts Japan’s repeated failures to spend its way out of debt will provide a lesson that will be heeded by Greece and the entire EU. He also cautions against the expansive growth of regulation in the U.S.
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January 3, 2015
Australian author and blogger Claire Lehmann questions the rise of anti-intellectualism in modern feminism and the risks of tribalization in digital communication.
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DEC 27, 2014
Michael Williams, longest current member of The Drifters, discusses their breakout R&B hits of the 50s and 60s with recordings of “White Christmas” and “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Recorded around one mic, the group’s unique vibe gave it a persisting legacy.
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DEC 27, 2014
Brian Jones, owner of A Christmas Story House, museum, and Red Rider Leg Lampsdiscusses the cult film classic and his surprising career move from Naval Intelligence to Leg Lamp entrepreneur.
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DEC 20, 2014
Dr. Terence Kealey, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, debunks the call for government funding of scientific research. Kealey points to the political missteps of the eugenics movement and the space race to illustrate amoral groupthink and economic waste.
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DEC 20, 2014
David Brin, scientist, futurist, and Hugo and Nebula Award winning author, explores how science fiction can improve the future, by helping us chart technological dangers to avoid and promising goals to pursue.
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DEC 13, 2014
Long Island family business owner and civil forfeiture victim Jeff Hirsch and his Institute for Justice attorney, Larry Salzman, discuss how the local police teamed up with the IRS to seize $447,000 from the Hirsch business bank account—without so much as charging Hirsch with a crime. Two years on, the police have yet to file charges or return the money. Salzman details the rampant abuse of civil forfeiture laws nationwide, including egregious instances of failure to follow due process in U.S. Attorney General nominee Loretta Lynch’s district.
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DEC 13, 2014
Neema Singh Guliani, legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, discusses the evolution of the National Security Agency from a focus on foreign intelligence gathering to blanket spying on American citizens at home. Guliani argues that domestic surveillance has become far more intrusive than originally intended, and that the bipartisan issue of surveillance reform will continue to stay in the political fore with the new Congress and 2016 elections
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DEC 6, 2014
Robert Graboyes, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center, likens regulatory policy of the IT and healthcare industries to a frontier and a fortress, respectively. Graboyes argues that the Food and Drug Administration’s slow-walk drug approval process creates an invisible graveyard of people who die waiting for new treatments. Instead, he proposes allowing greater innovation, as is common in IT, to create more effective, affordable care and treatment options.
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DEC 6, 2014
Joe Quirk of the Seasteading Institute, who proudly dubs himself a “Seavangelist,” describes how floating communities would encourage governments to act more like companies rather than monopolies and treat citizens more like customers whose loyalty they must earn. Using the cruise industry as a model, Quirk predicts seasteading will become a reality for “aqua-preneurs” by the year 2020.
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Bill Frezza 