My Mercatus Center colleague Veronique de Rugy likes much of what she reads in the recent manifesto from Black Lives Matter, but she’s also disappointed at what that manifesto doesn’t say. Here are Vero’s opening paragraphs:
Black Lives Matter has delivered a ten-point manifesto of what they want. I have to say, it isn’t as bad as I expected. In fact, some of it makes a lot of sense. For example, they ask for the end of “broken windows” policing, the end of “for-profit policing practices” such as civil asset forfeiture as well and the end of “the police use of military equipment.”
What I am, however, surprised about is that the list doesn’t at all mention ending the failed Drug War even though many of their demands are to end policies (like the ones mentioned above) that are by-products of the Drug War. It is even more surprising since many have noted how the black community suffers disproportionately from the policy.
Cato’s Tom Firey, like Vero, argues that minimum wages abuse black lives.
Similarly, Eileen Wittig celebrates the civilizing forces of commerce.
Jeff Jacoby reasons that making college ‘free’ is a sure-fire way to make it more costly.
Here’s a new study by my Mercatus Center colleague Adam Thierer. From Mercatus’s intro page:
Do citizens have the right to determine their own courses of treatment and to use medicines and devices that they believe could improve their health? In other words, do patients have a “right to try” medicines and devices that can help them?
In a new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Mercatus Senior Research Fellow Adam Thierer offers a fresh perspective on the right to try. Rather than wading into the ethical debate, the study questions the practicality of government control over patient decision-making in an era of increasingly personalized medicine and decentralized technology.
