leviramsey's Journal: Cato @ Liberty

For those of you that haven't discovered the Cato Institute's Cato @ Liberty blog, here are a pair of highlights:

• The leading advocacy group for a living wage argued in a California court 11 years ago that increasing the amount they had to pay their outreach workers (whether through a minimum wage increase or through having to pay overtime) would force them to hire fewer outreach workers
• The Libertarian Center:

  Glaeser and Ward are right. There is little principled difference between the Rs and Ds these days about the size and scope of government. On that score, the main disagreements now are about which favored groups get to feed at the government trough at the expense of the rest of us. By contrast, the really fundamental issues today, the issues that define ideological loyalties and drive voters to the polls, are cultural questions: abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, guns, immigration, nationalism. Church attendance is now a better predictor of voting patterns than income.
  
  And so, whether Jonah likes it or not, libertarians are in the center of the American political debate as it is currently framed. In the red vs. blue culture wars, libertarians find themselves in the middle, along with that large, nonideological chunk of the electorate that is equally squeamish about the religious right and the countercultural left. This is a new and unaccustomed position for libertarians to be in, but I am coming to believe it represents a unique opportunity for us if we can figure out how to take advantage of it.