Several Cato scholars (including me and Cato's president) wrote op-eds on the other side of the warrantless wiretapping debate. We're a think tank, not a lobbying outfit, so we don't have a "party line"--sometimes that leads to scholars writing things that most people (including me in this case) don't consider libertarian.
That's a serious charge. Do you have any evidence? Microsoft has given Cato money in the past, but Cato donors don't fund specific research projects, and I don't know of any studies we've published that fit your description. Cato scholars did side with Microsoft during the antitrust case, but we've taken a number of positions since then that are at odds with Microsoft's agenda.
Um, what? I don't know where you're writing from, but here in the United States, "we" do not forbid "hate speech." We have this little thing called the First Amendment that prevents the government from doing so.
Similarly, I think most people would agree that a Nazi rally can "do harm to the public" but the ACLU nevertheless successfully sued for their right to have their rally.
Cato is staffed and funded by libertarians, so I guess it's true that we're "biased" in a libertarian direction. But that's rather different from saying that we "have shown they are willing to place and promote false information that directly benefits their funders," which was the comment I was originally responding to.
And I don't really want to get into an argument over health care, which I don't know very much about. It sounds to me like you have some policy disagreements with our health care scholars. That's rather different from them telling "bold faced lies."
Anyway, while 2% of Cato's funding is directly from corporate sources 83% of their income is from "Individuals" who may or may not have close ties to industry. Now, I don't know how closely associated what Cato's publishes with how it's funded but there seems to be a significant "Conservative" bias.
Well sure. Most non-profits are supported by relatively rich people, and most rich people got that way from industry. So in some sense, every non-profit has "industry ties." I can tell you that no one at Cato has ever told me what subjects to write about or what conclusions to reach.
And the term you're looking for is "libertarian," not conservative.
As for HSAs, that sounds to me like a difference of opinion more than a lie. HSAs allow people to keep their own money in a tax-free account. That different from the state spending taxpayer dollars on peoples' health care. You may not agree with our health care scholars' conclusions, but I don't see how preferring HSAs to socialized medicine is a "bold faced lie."
The problem is that metrometro didn't point to any specific examples of "false information," so there's not much I can do to respond to such a vague accusation. Instead, I thought I'd highlight our recent work on issues of particular interest to Slashdot readers in order to give readers some context. I'm not going to claim everything we publish is high quality (we publish about a dozen books, 50 papers, and hundreds of articles every year), but in my experience, the vast majority of what we publish is of high quality.
And incidentally, the insinuation that we're "well funded by industry" is false: if you look at our annual report, you'll see that only about 2 percent of our funding is from corporate sources.
I'm a longtime Slashdot reader and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute. I'm not sure why you're so hostile to the Cato Institute, but you might want to check out a few of our recent publications:
Obviously, you're not going to agree with everything we publish, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another think tank that's done as much work on the issues near and dear to the hearts of Slashdotters.
If you check out Cato's 2005 annual report, you'll find that Cato only received about 2 percent of their budget. We don't have a legion of lawyers, corporate-funded or otherwise.
It's also interesting that you don't cite any "false information." Are we supposed to just take your word for it that a lot of what we put out is false?
I don't know of a good general reference, but here's the general history: the Baby Bells were subject to common carrier regulations--first the "computer inquiries" of the 1960s-80s, and later the "local loop unbundling" regime that the FCC imposed after the '96 telecom act. These weren't regulations of the Internet as such, but rather were designed to prevent the Bells from using their non-Internet monopoly position to give them an unfair advantage in the Internet market.
The rest of the Internet--including cable providers like Comcast, Tier 1 providers like Global Crossing and Level 3, and providers of business-class Internet service--have never been subject to any kind of common carrier regime. The cable companies were declared to be "information services" exempt from most regulations soon after the 1996 Telecom Act was passed. And other non-residential Internet providers (AFAIK, anyway) has never been subject to the FCC's jurisdiction at all.
I've never heard of the FCC putting conditions on NSFNet's privatization of the backbone. The NSF web page summarizing the hand-over doesn't mention it. I can't prove it didn't happen, but I've never seen any evidence that it did. Perhaps "ProfDumb" can enlighten us.
I don't "advocate intelligent design," which I, in fact, think is hogwash. I advocate letting parents, rather than government officials, decide what their children are taught.
What evidence do you have that I'm an "astroturf fraud?"
Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. The 2005 Brand X decision concerned whether the cable companies' "last mile" was subject to common carrier regulations. Once they lost that, the FCC deregulated the Baby Bells' "last mile" too. But the backbone, as well as all non-telephone based 'net connections, have never been subject to anything like network neutrality regulations.
Dude, I don't have that much control over how news sources cite my name--that article (which I suspect most Slashdotters would agree with) was run in a bunch of different web sites. I didn't go around to make sure they all included my middle initial.
And you might have noticed my byline:
Timothy B. Lee (tlee@showmeinstitute.org) is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute and author of the Cato Policy Analysis, "Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
I think it's hilarious that people think the similarity of my name to that of Mr. Berners-Lee is some kind of telco conspiracy.
Right, because when the government passes a law saying "no bad stuff shall be done with personal data," that will magically prevent any bad stuff being done with anyone's personal data.
Governments are made of fallible human beings, some of whom have less-than-pure motives. Having a massive government database with every conceivable kind of information about you would be ripe for abuse, no matter how many laws we pass to try to prevent it.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone doesn't know what he's talking about, but I don't think it's @asukasoryu.
My Slashdot number is almost an order of magnitude larger. ;-)
How is it a hit piece on libertarians?
Um, OP is a libertarian. And nowhere did I generalize to all libertarians.
I've been a Slashdot member a lot longer than you have.
I'm not allowed to express the same opinion more than once?
Several Cato scholars (including me and Cato's president) wrote op-eds on the other side of the warrantless wiretapping debate. We're a think tank, not a lobbying outfit, so we don't have a "party line"--sometimes that leads to scholars writing things that most people (including me in this case) don't consider libertarian.
That's a serious charge. Do you have any evidence? Microsoft has given Cato money in the past, but Cato donors don't fund specific research projects, and I don't know of any studies we've published that fit your description. Cato scholars did side with Microsoft during the antitrust case, but we've taken a number of positions since then that are at odds with Microsoft's agenda.
Um, you can't a copyright on a chemical process.
I get the sense you didn't RTFA. Or know what a neocon is, for that matter.
Bullshit like this? Or this?
This is why we forbid hate speech
Um, what? I don't know where you're writing from, but here in the United States, "we" do not forbid "hate speech." We have this little thing called the First Amendment that prevents the government from doing so.
Similarly, I think most people would agree that a Nazi rally can "do harm to the public" but the ACLU nevertheless successfully sued for their right to have their rally.
Yeah, we certainly wouldn't want to talk to icky brown people.
Cato is staffed and funded by libertarians, so I guess it's true that we're "biased" in a libertarian direction. But that's rather different from saying that we "have shown they are willing to place and promote false information that directly benefits their funders," which was the comment I was originally responding to.
And I don't really want to get into an argument over health care, which I don't know very much about. It sounds to me like you have some policy disagreements with our health care scholars. That's rather different from them telling "bold faced lies."
Anyway, while 2% of Cato's funding is directly from corporate sources 83% of their income is from "Individuals" who may or may not have close ties to industry. Now, I don't know how closely associated what Cato's publishes with how it's funded but there seems to be a significant "Conservative" bias.
Well sure. Most non-profits are supported by relatively rich people, and most rich people got that way from industry. So in some sense, every non-profit has "industry ties." I can tell you that no one at Cato has ever told me what subjects to write about or what conclusions to reach.
And the term you're looking for is "libertarian," not conservative.
As for HSAs, that sounds to me like a difference of opinion more than a lie. HSAs allow people to keep their own money in a tax-free account. That different from the state spending taxpayer dollars on peoples' health care. You may not agree with our health care scholars' conclusions, but I don't see how preferring HSAs to socialized medicine is a "bold faced lie."
The problem is that metrometro didn't point to any specific examples of "false information," so there's not much I can do to respond to such a vague accusation. Instead, I thought I'd highlight our recent work on issues of particular interest to Slashdot readers in order to give readers some context. I'm not going to claim everything we publish is high quality (we publish about a dozen books, 50 papers, and hundreds of articles every year), but in my experience, the vast majority of what we publish is of high quality.
And incidentally, the insinuation that we're "well funded by industry" is false: if you look at our annual report, you'll see that only about 2 percent of our funding is from corporate sources.
Obviously, you're not going to agree with everything we publish, but you'd be hard-pressed to find another think tank that's done as much work on the issues near and dear to the hearts of Slashdotters.
If you check out Cato's 2005 annual report, you'll find that Cato only received about 2 percent of their budget. We don't have a legion of lawyers, corporate-funded or otherwise.
I would be curious to know which industry sources funded my paper criticizing the DMCA. Or for that matter, their recent papers criticizing the Bush administration's civil liberties record and the NSA's wiretapping program.
It's also interesting that you don't cite any "false information." Are we supposed to just take your word for it that a lot of what we put out is false?
I don't know of a good general reference, but here's the general history: the Baby Bells were subject to common carrier regulations--first the "computer inquiries" of the 1960s-80s, and later the "local loop unbundling" regime that the FCC imposed after the '96 telecom act. These weren't regulations of the Internet as such, but rather were designed to prevent the Bells from using their non-Internet monopoly position to give them an unfair advantage in the Internet market.
The rest of the Internet--including cable providers like Comcast, Tier 1 providers like Global Crossing and Level 3, and providers of business-class Internet service--have never been subject to any kind of common carrier regime. The cable companies were declared to be "information services" exempt from most regulations soon after the 1996 Telecom Act was passed. And other non-residential Internet providers (AFAIK, anyway) has never been subject to the FCC's jurisdiction at all.
I've never heard of the FCC putting conditions on NSFNet's privatization of the backbone. The NSF web page summarizing the hand-over doesn't mention it. I can't prove it didn't happen, but I've never seen any evidence that it did. Perhaps "ProfDumb" can enlighten us.
I don't "advocate intelligent design," which I, in fact, think is hogwash. I advocate letting parents, rather than government officials, decide what their children are taught.
What evidence do you have that I'm an "astroturf fraud?"
Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. The 2005 Brand X decision concerned whether the cable companies' "last mile" was subject to common carrier regulations. Once they lost that, the FCC deregulated the Baby Bells' "last mile" too. But the backbone, as well as all non-telephone based 'net connections, have never been subject to anything like network neutrality regulations.
Dude, I don't have that much control over how news sources cite my name--that article (which I suspect most Slashdotters would agree with) was run in a bunch of different web sites. I didn't go around to make sure they all included my middle initial.
And you might have noticed my byline:
Timothy B. Lee (tlee@showmeinstitute.org) is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute and author of the Cato Policy Analysis, "Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."
I think it's hilarious that people think the similarity of my name to that of Mr. Berners-Lee is some kind of telco conspiracy.
If I'm a highly paid lobbyist, I want to know why I'm not rich yet.
Right, because when the government passes a law saying "no bad stuff shall be done with personal data," that will magically prevent any bad stuff being done with anyone's personal data.
Governments are made of fallible human beings, some of whom have less-than-pure motives. Having a massive government database with every conceivable kind of information about you would be ripe for abuse, no matter how many laws we pass to try to prevent it.