Lew, your post contains a depressingly good summary of the primary unlibertarian and un-Austrian positions propounded by Cato: as you note, the policies they push expand the State:
massive money printing (for the big banks and big companies), school vouchers (to deliver private schools into the hands of government), the Ownership Society (every person a homeowner through Greenspan’s housing bubble), Social Security Privatization (a new layer of forced savings on top of the present SS taxes, to benefit Wall Street), etc.
In a previous LRC post, What Kind of Libertarian Are You?, I assembled some links to cases where Cato unfortunately strays from the troika of basic libertarian principles of free markets, non-interventionism, and civil liberties, in particular where various Catoites:
- have opposed tax cuts;
- think people who advocate the aboliton of all medical licensing are “moonbats”;
- think we need inflation to counter irrational exuberance;
- defend the Iraq war (not all of them, thank goodness);
- praise socialist-welfarist John Rawls;
- defend federal surveillance and the “Police America Act”;
- prefer Hamilton to Jefferson;
- are tepid in criticizing state-imposed intellectual property (and many of them support IP);
- support centralized federal supervision of states;
- praise “sensible gun regulations”;
- sought $3.5M in DC taxpayers’ money for reimbursement for helping to foist a national rule on the entire country that redefines the natural right to bear arms as a limited State-conferred privilege, clearing the way for all manner of gun regulations;
- flirt with the idea of carbon taxes;
- support NAFTA’s managed trade system;
- laud Ben Bernanke’s performance as Fed Chairman and distractingly focus on the importance of the “independence” of the Fed;
- want to run the TSA (and see Bob Poole on the TSA);
- opposed Ossetian independence from Russian in the name of “territorial integrity”;
- consort with Russian dictators.
