What I learned at Cato Club Naples 14 November

The second term for any president is almost always a disaster, crashing hard in the pivotal year six. The party in the White House can expect a thrashing in the House as well as losses in the Senate. No one I spoke with expects a divergence in course this time around.

Cato is a policy firm, not a politically driven group. Given that, there was near unanimous opinion at the conclave that those favoring small government have just been delivered a nasty, if temporary, body blow by the Marxist-oriented, big government crowd. There remains less than two years until the mid-term elections, but expected losses in the House will be projected much earlier. The general consensus of the Cato crowd is that the party of small government needs to lay off the social issues (as is Cato’s practice), get younger, and become more inclusive with Latinos. Hard-working, religious, family-oriented Latinos are a natural fit for assimilation into the small government sphere. It was also felt that a much younger, more focused candidate would have done small government Americans well.

There seemed to a majority view that a sizeable contingent of evangelicals, Ron Paulists and anti-neocons stayed home. This clearly needs not be the case in future elections. Looking ahead, the names Jindal, Paul (Rand), Rubio, Cruz and Martinez were mentioned positively.

Debbie, Matt and I sat with Cato Chairman Bob Levy, Cato co-founder Ed Crane, and incoming president and CEO John Allison. I wish you could have the opportunity to meet each. The next two Naples Cato events are December 14 and January 30 (the big East Coast annual event). You will be astounded at the camaraderie and excitement of this sizable crowd of like minds. Debbie and I schedule our year to try not to miss any big Cato conclave. I hope you can join us.

John Allison shares the following: “I used to believe that the Federal Reserve was second only to Congress in destroying wealth and well being. However, it now appears that the Fed is committed to moving into first place as Bernanke has decided to implement fiscal policy as well as monetary policy. The purpose of money is to provide a standard of value, analogous to a yardstick in engineering…. The question is when someone (like the Chinese) will decide that the ‘emperor has no clothes’ and the U.S. dollar will crash along with our economy…. At the minimum, the Fed must be controlled by a gold standard. At the optimum, we should return to a true private banking system as the United States successfully experienced in the late 1800s.”

John’s Wall Street Journal/New York Times best-selling The Financial Crisis and The Free Money Cure is the beacon every American needs to show the way through the crisis now being purposely engineered by the Marxist-influenced big government charade that is the Obama administration.