- Doug Bandow
Douglas (Doug) Bandow is a former columnist with Copley News Service and senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. He resigned in 2005 due a scandal involving payments for columns from lobbyist Jack Abramoff and wrote about it in the Los Angeles Times. He served as a Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan and as a Senior Policy Analyst in the 1980 Reagan for President campaign. He is also a columnist for Antiwar.com.
- David Boaz
Cato's executive vice president David Boaz has played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He is a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism.
- Johan Norberg
Johan Norberg (born August 27 1973) is a Swedish writer devoted to promoting economic globalisation and individual liberty. He is the author of the much celebrated "In Defense of Global Capitalism". He also presented the British Channel 4 documentary "Globalisation is Good", which is based on his book. Since March 15 2007 he is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
- Will Wilkinson
Will Wilkinson (born 1973) is an American libertarian writer and thinker. Currently he is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute where he works on a variety of issues including Social Security reform and, most notably, the policy implications of happiness research. Wilkinson is also the managing editor of the Cato Institute's monthly web magazine, Cato Unbound.
- Jerry Taylor
Jerry Taylor (born 1963 or 1964) is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute where he researches environmental policy. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Iowa. He is also a board game designer who has released two wargames, Hammer of the Scots and "Crusader Rex". He resides in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and son.
- Richard Epstein
Richard Allen Epstein (born April 17, 1943) is the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, the Faculty Director for Curriculum, and the Director, Law and Economics Program at the University of Chicago Law School. He is also an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Beginning in 2007, he is a visiting professor of law at New York University Law School.
- Brink Lindsey
As Cato's vice president for research, Brink Lindsey helps to oversee the Institute's current research agenda and develops new research programs. From 1998 to 2004, he was director of Cato's Center for Trade Policy Studies , helping to make it a leading voice for free trade. An attorney with extensive experience in international trade regulation, Lindsey was formerly director of regulatory studies at Cato and senior editor of Regulation magazine.
- Stephen Moore
Stephen Moore (born February 16, 1960 in Chicago, Illinois) is an economist and policy analyst who founded and served as president of the Club for Growth from 1999 to 2004. He is currently a member of the "Wall Street Journal" editorial board and frequently opines on the pages of their Op-Ed section. He is also a contributing editor for "National Review". He possesses a B.A. from the University of Illinois and an M.A. from George Mason University in economics.
- Tom G. Palmer
Tom G. Palmer is Vice President for International Programs at the Cato Institute, director of the Center for Promotion of Human Rights, a Senior Fellow of the Institute, and director of Cato University, the Institute's educational arm.
- Randal O'Toole
Randal O'Toole is an American economist and public policy expert. He has held the position of director at the Oregon-based Thoreau Institute since 1975. Since 1995, he has been associated with the Cato Institute as an adjunct scholar. The majority of O'Toole's work has focused on environmental policy, particularly public land use and regional and urban development.
- Roger Pilon
Roger Pilon is Vice President for Legal Affairs for the Cato Institute, and an American libertarian legal theorist. In particular, he has developed a libertarian version of the rights theory of his teacher, noted philosopher Alan Gewirth. These views are discussed in discourse ethics.
- Dave Kopel
Dave Kopel is an American author, attorney, political science researcher and contributing editor to several publications. He is currently Research Director of the Independence Institute, Associate Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute, contributor to the National Review magazine and Volokh Conspiracy legal blog. Previously he was Adjunct Professor of Law, New York University, on the Board of Directors of the Colorado Union of Taxpayers, …
- William A. Niskanen
William A. Niskanen is chairman of the Cato Institute, a position he has held since 1985 following service on President Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. He was formerly professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and UCLA and was an assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget. Niskanen's most noted work is his Bureaucracy and Representative Government published in 1971, …
- Stephen Slivinski
Stephen Slivinski is the director of budget studies at the Cato Institute. He has previously worked for the Tax Foundation, the James Madison Institute and the Goldwater Institute. He has written extensively on the United States Congress's spending practices, and published a book on Republican budget policy in 2006.
- Walter E. Williams
Born in Philadelphia in 1936, Walter E. Williams holds a bachelor's degree in economics from California State University (1965) and a master's degree (1967) and doctorate (1972) in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1980, he joined the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and is currently the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics.
- José Piñera
José Piñera is a prominent Chilean free-market economist and public intellectual. He is best known as the architect of Chile's private pension system based on personal retirement accounts. Dr. Piñera is considered "the world's foremost advocate of privatizing public pension systems" (1) and has been called "the Pension Reform Pied Piper" by the Wall Street Journal(2).
- Ivan Eland
Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute and Assistant Editor of The Independent Review. Dr. Eland is a graduate of Iowa State University and received an M.B.A. in applied economics and Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University.
- Patrick Michaels
Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., (born February 15, 1950) is a Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. He has been the university's Climatologist for Virginia since 1980. His professional specialty was the influence of climate on agriculture. In interviews Michaels has said that he does not contest the basic scientific principles behind greenhouse warming and acknowledges that global mean temperature has increased in recent decades, …
- Sheldon Richman
Sheldon Richman is editor of The Freeman , published by The Foundation for Economic Education in Irvington, New York, and serves as senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is the author of FFFs award-winning book Separating School & State: How to Liberate Americas Families ; Your Money or Your Life: Why We Must Abolish the Income Tax ; and FFFs newest book Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State.
- Ian Vásquez
Ian Vásquez is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He is a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Cato Institute in 1992, Vásquez worked on inter-American issues at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Caribbean/Latin American Action.
- Steven Milloy
Steven J. Milloy is the "Junk Science" commentator for FoxNews.com and runs the website Junkscience.com, which is dedicated to debunking what Milloy labels "faulty scientific data and analysis." Among the topics Milloy has addressed are what he believes to be false claims regarding DDT, global warming, Alar, breast implants, secondhand smoke, ozone depletion, and mad cow disease.
- Ed Crane
Edward H. Crane is the founder and president of the Cato Institute. In the 1970s, he was one of the most active leaders of the Libertarian Party. He was the Party's national chairman from 1974 to 1977, and managed Ed Clark's high-profile 1978 campaign to be Governor of California. In 1977, with the funding of Charles Koch and the assistance of Murray Rothbard, Crane established the Cato Institute, which would grow into the best-known libertarian think-tank in the world.
- Randy Barnett
Randy E. Barnett (born February 5, 1952) is a lawyer, a law professor at Georgetown University Law Center, and a legal theorist in the United States. He writes about the libertarian theory of law and contract theory, constitutional law, and jurisprudence. After attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Barnett worked as a prosecutor in Chicago, Illinois.
- Ronald Bailey
Ronald Bailey (born November 23, 1953) is the science editor for "Reason" magazine. He was born and raised in Washington County, Virginia, and attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a B.A. in philosophy and economics in 1976. He attended the University of Virginia School of Law for three semesters. Bailey worked briefly as an economist for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission before turning to his career in writing and television production.
- Brian Doherty
Brian Doherty is a Senior Editor at "Reason" magazine. He is the author of "This is Burning Man" (Little, Brown, 2004) and "Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement" (PublicAffairs, 2007). Before working for the Cato Institute in the early '90s, he served as an intern at "Liberty Magazine" and wrote on music and popular culture at The Independent Florida Alligator.
- Peter Ferrara
Peter J. Ferrara is an American policy analyst and columnist, known for the proposal to privatize Social Security championed by the George W. Bush administration, and for taking money from convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff to write op-ed pieces favorable to Abramoff clients such as the Northern Marianas Islands and Indian tribes such as the Choctaw. Ferrara remains unrepentant and intends to pursue the practice in the future: "I do that all the time.
- Clint Bolick
Clint Bolick is the director of the Goldwater Institute Center for Constitutional Litigation in Phoenix, Arizona. Bolick previously served as the president and general counsel of the Alliance for School Choice, a national nonprofit educational policy group advocating school choice programs across the United States. Bolick is a co-founder of the Institute for Justice.
- Daniel Griswold
Daniel T. Griswold is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies. Before joining Cato in 1997, Griswold served as a congressional press secretary and a daily newspaper editorial page editor. Griswold holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin and a M.Sc. in the politics of the world economy from the London School of Economics.
- Charles G. Koch
Charles de Ganahl Koch (born November 1, 1935) is chairman of the board and chief executive officer of Koch Industries, Inc., the largest privately held company by revenue in the U.S.. From 1961, when Koch went to work at his father's business, through 2006, the value of the Standard & Poor's 500 grew about 110-fold, assuming the reinvestment of dividends. During that same period, the value of Koch Industries grew nearly 2,000-fold, using the same assumptions.
- Jim Powell
Jim Powell is Senior Fellow at a libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., with which he has been associated since 1988. He has also done work for the Manhattan Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, Citizens for a Sound Economy, the National Right to Work Committee and Americans for Free Choice in Medicine. Powell is an author on the history of liberty and its adversaries.
- Steve Hanke
Steve H. Hanke is an American economist specializing in international economics, particularly monetary policy. He holds a doctoral degree. Earlier in his teaching career, he taught economics at the Colorado School of Mines and the University of California, Berkeley. As of 2005, he is a professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins University. In 1981 and '82, during the Reagan administration, he was a Senior Economist on the Council of Economic Advisors.
- Tibor R. Machan
Tibor Richard Machan, Ph.D. (born 18 March 1939), professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California. He is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the Pacific Research Foundation in San Francisco.
- Ralph Raico
Ralph Raico is professor of European history at the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, where the head of his dissertation committee was F.A. Hayek. Among Dr. Raico's articles and essays are: "Rethinking Churchill" in The Costs of War, John V. Denson , ed.; "Austrian Economics and Classical Liberalism," in Advances in Austrian Economics , vol.
- Robert L. Bradley Jr.
Robert L. Bradley, Jr., (born June 17, 1955) is president of the Institute for Energy Research in Houston, Texas; an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.; and a visiting fellow of the Institute for Economic Affairs in London. Bradley has a Ph.D. in political economy and has held the position of senior research fellow at both the University of Houston and the University of Texas at Austin.
- Vernon L. Smith
Professor Vernon L. Smith pioneered the field of experimental economics nearly 50 years ago. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002 for his contributions to the economic sciences. Before 1956, when Dr. Smith completed his first experiment, economic theory assumed markets are efficient only with a large number of buyers and sellers. Experimental methods were the first to test such theories.
- David H. Koch
David Hamilton Koch (born 1940) is one of the billionaire co-owners (with older brother Charles) and an executive vice president of Koch Industries, a conglomerate with major oil and gas holdings that is the largest privately held company in the United States. He lives in New York City and is that city's wealthiest resident. David Koch was the Libertarian Party's Vice-Presidential candidate in the 1980 U.S. presidential election, sharing the party ticket with Ed Clark.
- Howard Rich
Howard Rich is a libertarian political activist and real estate developer in New York City. Rich's political activity is focused on financing ballot initiatives in numerous states. Issues include restrictions on regulatory taking and eminent domain, term limits for judges and legislators, and state spending limits modeled after Colorado's controversial Taxpayer Bill of Rights.
- Roger A. Pielke
Roger Pielke is the former director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (2001-2007). He has been on the faculty of the University of Colorado since 2001 and is a professor in the Environmental Studies Program and a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences (CIRES). His current areas of interest include understanding the politicization of science, decision making under uncertainty, and policy education for scientists.
- Don Lavoie
Don C. Lavoie (April 4, 1951 - November 6, 2001) was an Austrian school economist. He worked at the Cato Institute. He wrote a book entitled "National Economic Planning: What Is Left?" (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1985). He was influenced by Friedrich Hayek, Michael Polanyi and Ludwig Lachmann. Among his students, there are a number of "contemporary Austrian" economists: Peter Boettke, David Prychitko, Steve Horwitz, Ralph Rector, …
- George H. Smith
George Hamilton Smith (born February 10, 1949 in Japan, the son of a U.S. serviceman and his wife who were stationed there) is a libertarian author and educator. He grew up mostly in Tucson, Arizona, and attended the University of Arizona for several years before leaving without a degree. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1971, Smith (through the intercession of Roy A. Childs, …