September 17, 2016   The Heritage Insider: Are we Americans or just people who live in America?  Our summer issue of The Insider looks globally to assess our circumstances locally, with articles on what’s wrong with Europe, the flaw in transnationalism, the threat from ISIS, the benefits of free trade, and how we should fight for people instead of against things. Europe’s revolt against reality. The European Union has its own parliament, army, central bank, foreign policy, and currency. It’s propagandizers are so keen on promoting a European identity that they produced a graphic noting European Union athletes won 325 Olympic medals at the Rio games, more than any other country—as if the European Union were a country. At the same time, this body employs 1,750 linguists, 600 full-time interpreters, and 3,000 free lancers to translate every document it produces into 24 different languages. That’s four times as many languages as the United Nations uses. Clearly, ...

July 23, 2016 Dodd-Frank is 6-years-old this week. It’s not getting better with age. Student loans not only inflate the cost of college; they also deflate the amount of work college students are doing. Do police shootings reflect racism or simply the places where police are most likely to be doing police work? Have you noticed planes aren’t getting any faster? It’s probably because of the FAA’s speed limit. Happy 104th to Milton Friedman. Get your nominations in for the Bastiat Prize. Plus, over 40 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty. Happy birthday, Dodd-Frank. Now go away. Sam Batkins and Dan Goldbeck summarize the effects of the financial reforms passed six years ago this week: “Dodd-Frank has imposed more than $36 billion in final rule costs and 73 million paperwork hours, up from $24 billion in final rule cos...

May 28, 2016 The regulatory state just keeps getting bigger. Before it gets any bigger, Congress should bring some political accountability to the process. Unions say they are good for workers, but the evidence says otherwise. The OECD wants to let foreign bureaucrats look at your bank account. Who will lead the way around ObamaCare? Maybe millennials. We were always pretty sure the Competitive Enterprise Institute wasn’t going to shut up about climate change or any other issue; now they’re punching back against the state AGs’ subpoena abuse—with good effect. Plus, over 60 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty. Red Tape Still Rising. Since 2009, the Obama administration has added 229 major regulations, with $108 billion in quantifiable costs, to the regulatory burden facing Americans, reports James L. Gattuso and Di...

The Heritage Insider: New overtime rule will hurt workers, so will Calif. minimum wage, FCC is shaking down firms, too much Medicaid is bad for the poor, and the Iran lies are revealed  The Department of Labor’s new overtime rule is going to hurt both workers and employers. California is also getting in the way of opportunity with its minimum wage hike. How too much Medicaid spending hurts the poor. The FCC is using its power over broadcast licenses to shakedown private firms. And the truth about the Iran deal is now plain for all to see. Plus, over 60 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.  Making work more complicated and costly: The Department of Labor has proposed a new rule that it thinks will increase the number of workers who will either receive overtime pay or see the salaries ...

May 14, 2016 Obama’s Justice Department is rewriting the law in order to force public schools to let men into women’s restrooms and locker rooms. That doesn’t sound like a good idea to women who have been sexually assaulted by men in women’s restrooms. While the Obama administration is busy sexually integrating bathrooms, Harvard shows equal cluelessness about the value of single-sex social clubs. When some economists say tax havens are not useful, they should be asked: Useful to whom? Universal preschool would end up being another middle class entitlement. Worse than that, it might actually hurt the kids. Plus, over 40 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.  First they said gender identity and sex are not the same thing; now they say they are the same thing. On Friday, the Obama Justice Department declared that f...

May 7, 2016 Will today’s newborns live better than their parents? The trends are not as hopeful as Americans have come to expect. Socialized transit is hazardous to riders ’ health. No, mandating renewables will not cut your electricity bills. Yes, illegal voting does benefit one party, but that’s no reason to favor illegal voting. There is a reason climate activists want to avoid a discussion of both the costs and the benefits of their policies. Plus, over 30 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.  Choking the golden goose: Every generation of Americans has lived better than its parents, but, as Jim Agresti notes, a number of trends threaten to disrupt that record of progress: The rising national debt that future generations will have to pay, the decline in work, the growing regulatory burden on the economy, an...

April 16, 2016 This coming week, the Supreme Court will hear the challenge to the President’s immigration order. The case raises the same question that confronted the English at Runnymede. Tax cuts for the middle class are popular, but the choices aren’t all equal. The gender pay gap is still a myth. Mandatory collective bargaining for public workers costs you at least $600 per year. How often does the President’s Supreme Court nominee defer to government agencies? Plus, over 40 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.   The President is still not a king. This coming week, the Supreme Court will hear the state of Texas’s challenge to President Obama’s immigration order granting “legal presence” to 4 million illegal immigrants. As Michael McConnell explains, the president’s action amounts to an exercise of wha...

April 9, 2016  The Heritage Insider: ObamaCare's failings, R.I.P. John Taylor, criminalizing dissent, Panama Papers, crony capitalism feeds social liberalism, and where did the respect for free speech go? We’re now six years into ObamaCare and there is plenty of evidence that the law is failing. R.I.P. John Taylor, whose steadfast and principled leadership of the Virginia Policy Institute made him a force for liberty. With every passing day, it seems dissenting from liberal-Left orthodoxy is more likely to be a crime. Investigative journalists are in a feeding frenzy over the Panama Papers, but it’s really a story about why tax competition is so necessary. What’s the connection between crony capitalism and the culture wars? Why do students care so little for freedom of speech today and what can be done about it? Plus, over 50 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing...

April 2, 2016 The question of mandatory union fees will be settled another day, as the Supreme Court has punted on Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association . Meanwhile, compelled union politics appears alive and well in Chicago. It turns out that there are some safe spaces liberals do not care about. So far, the only health insurance coverage ObamaCare has expanded has been Medicaid. The burden of regulation doesn’t fall equally across the states; a new index measures the differences. Are Europe’s rigid labor laws feeding terrorism? Plus, over 50 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.    The question of mandatory union fees will be settled another day. The right of unions to compel the payment of agency fees from all represented employees, even those who disapprove of the political aspects of their un...

March 26, 2016 The Little Sisters of the Poor had their day in court this week; they want to know why Pepsi, Exxon, and Visa get an exemption from the contraception mandate, but they don’t. ObamaCare is 6-years-old and the results so far are poor. The only thing that will prove Congress wants to cut spending is Congress cutting spending. President Obama visited Cuba; what did the Castro regime do to deserve that? Tibor Machan, R.I.P. Plus, over 60 new studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events at The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.     Pepsi, Exxon, and Visa are exempt from the contraceptive mandate, but not Little Sisters of the Poor. The Little Sisters of the Poor had their day before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The charity, represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, is challenging the Department of Health and Human Services mandate that...

March 12, 2016 Can we break the connection between rising student loan debt and rising tuition? John Marcus examines a new way of financing college. The Federal Aviation Administration may have set a new standard in regulatory excess, say Jason Snead and John-Michael Seibler. Dodd-Frank may herald a new wave of politically inspired but economically pointless disclosure requirements, writes David Burton. Limiting urban growth could actually increase a city’s carbon footprint if it increases traffic congestion too much, explains Wendell Cox. Peter Robinson remembers Nancy Reagan and Ian Vasquez remembers Giancarlo Ibarguen. Plus we added over 30 studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events to the The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty.   Instead of debt, try equity for financing college. Making it easier for students to borrow for college has made it easier for col...

March 5, 2016 This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on whether Texas can impose on abortion clinics the same safety standards it imposes on ambulatory surgical centers. Elizabeth Slattery and Hans von Spakovsky write that the justices aren’t sure Texas is trying to do anything other than prevent another Kermit Gosnell. Also, fuel-economy standards are making new cars more expensive write Salim Furth and David Kreutzer. ObamaCare, states have discovered, contains a tax on the states themselves—something the Constitution forbids, explain Mario Loyola and John Davidson. Overly generous pensions caused Illinois’s pension crisis writes Ted Dabrowski. You can register now for Resource Bank 2016. And we added over 40 studies, articles, speeches, videos, and events to the The Insider this week. Visit to see what the conservative movement has been thinking, writing, saying, and doing to win battles for liberty. The government added at least $3,800 to the cost of your new c...

February 27, 2016 President Obama recently released his last budget, and this week The Heritage Foundation put out a plan of its own. Unlike the President’s plan, the Heritage plan charts a path to a balanced budget. Debate continues on whether the Senate should consider any nomination made by President Obama to replace Antonin Scalia. Did you know that the appointment power and the treaty power are found in the same section of the Constitution? Christopher Horner explains how the President has gotten both wrong. Hospitals don’t post their prices because you, the patient, are not the payer. But what if you really wanted to find out? You’re probably out of luck, says new research by the Pioneer Institute. Meanwhile, the paperwork burden in health care keeps getting bigger, finds Sam Batkins. And for our toolkit this week, Chaz Cirame notes some reasons to think your aol.com subscribers are more likely to carry your message than others. Also, this week we added over 50 studies...

February 6, 2016 Economic freedom is still the key to prosperity. “Economies rated ‘free’ or ‘mostly free’ enjoy incomes that are over twice the average levels in all other countries and more than four times higher than the incomes of ‘repressed’ economies. Nations with higher degrees of economic freedom prosper because they capitalize more fully on the ability of the free-market system to generate and reinforce dynamic growth through efficient resource allocation, value creation, and innovation. […] “The global average economic freedom score of 60.7 is the highest recorded in the 22-year history of the Index. It is noteworthy that despite recent policy missteps by many countries in responding to the global economic slowdown, the free-market system continues to flourish, accepted by governments around the world as the system most likely to improve the well-being of their populations and eliminate poverty. […] “Of the 178 economies ranked in the 2016 Index, five (Hong Kong,...