Cato Institute to Celebrate 25 Years of Advancing Liberty

3/8/2002

From: Richard Pollock, 202-218-4628, or Joan Kirby, 202-789-5266, both of the Cato Institute Web site: http://www.cato.org/

WASHINGTON, March 8 -- The year 2002 marks the 25th anniversary of the Cato Institute, a Washington public policy think tank committed to liberty and limited government. From its pioneering work in Social Security reform and its defense of individual liberties, to groundbreaking trips to the former Soviet Union and China, the Cato Institute has sought to advance policies that promote individual liberty, free markets and limited government.

Cato will launch a three-day celebration to mark its anniversary beginning with a Washington banquet on May 9, 2002. Featured at the dinner will be the inaugural presentation of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, a $500,000 award to a nominee who has made an exceptional contribution to the ongoing fight for freedom. The recipient of the biennial award is being selected by a distinguished nine-member committee that includes former prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and Vaclav Klaus; Italian defense minister Antonio Martino; Federal Express chairman and CEO Frederick W. Smith; Chinese entrepreneur Jimmy Lai; and Hernando de Soto, one of Latin America's preeminent development reformers.

Cato will also release special books and publications during the anniversary: Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World, a collection of Cato essays from the past 25 years edited by Cato executive vice president David Boaz; Cato Clippings, with 25 years of op-ed articles by Cato scholars; and a special 25-year commemorative report highlighting Cato's history. Leather-bound copies of the U.S. Constitution will be distributed as well. Cato has already distributed more than two million pocket copies of the Constitution throughout the United States.

The Cato Institute is known for its pioneering work in a range of domestic and global reform initiatives. The Institute developed the concept of Social Security privatization in 1979, now a major public policy reform initiative in Washington. Cato has published hundreds of books, studies, and magazine articles on such topics as economic liberty, the rule of law, free markets, foreign policy, school choice, welfare reform, federal regulation and drug prohibition. It provided support for Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek in his later years, during which he wrote The Fatal Conceit.

Cato's annual monetary conference (this year being its 20th) is one of the most respected of its kind in the world, attracting speakers such as Alan Greenspan, Robert Mundell and Larry Summers.

Overseas, Cato smuggled the book Solidarity with Liberty into Poland in the late 1980s and Friedman and Hayek on Freedom into the Soviet Union. It was the first organization to convene conferences on free markets and political liberty in the People's Republic of China (Shanghai, 1988) and in the former USSR (Moscow, 1990). Its ongoing series of international conferences have included four in China, two in the former Soviet Union, two in London and three in Mexico City.

On the foreign policy front, the Institute has raised the issue of the costs and risks of U.S. involvement in NATO and examined other risks of America's interventionist foreign policy. Cato scholars have advocated a more restrained U.S. presence abroad, warned of the risk of terrorism, and supported a strong and technologically sophisticated national defense.

For details about the Cato Institute's 25th Anniversary events in May, an overview of the Institute's 25-year history and the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, visit the Institute's 25th Anniversary Web site at http://www.cato.org/.

------ The Cato Institute is a 501(c)3 nonpartisan public policy research foundation dedicated to broadening policy debate consistent with the traditional American principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.