On Tuesday of this week, Kristina Kirchner, President of Argentina, announced that the government will be nationalizing $30 billion in private pension funds. As you can imagine, Atlas’s think tanks in Argentina have been writing and blogging about this economic catastrophe, which not only undermines the rule of law, but also puts Argentine property rights at risk. View the following links to learn more about this situation.

Fundacion Libertad

CADAL

A new website, Beyond Bailouts was launched this week. This website brings the work that think tanks across the United States are doing to draw attention to the causes and solutions to the financial crisis under one roof, in an effort to ensure that a free market perspective on these issues is heard and taken into account, view the press release.

Conservatives lost the battle to properly assess the causes of the Great Depression and that contributed to 70 years of expansion in the size and scope of the federal government.  Regardless of where folks were on the bailout before it happened, we should all be able to agree that another 70 years of that expansion would be unacceptable.

This website is eager to include your work, whether it be studies, op-eds, or letters. Take a look and share your work.

And, surprisingly for the Post (which tends to lean left), their answer is “No” in this editorial (10/20/08), published with the subtitle, “The market that failed was not exactly free.”

The piece reviews the U.S. government’s massive interventions to encourage home ownership, which distorted a large part of the economy. It’s nice to see the Post’s editorial board making statements like “We are not witnessing a crisis of the free market but a crisis of distorted markets”; “over the long term, business works best when it is subject to market discipline alone”; and “Government-sponsored, upside-only capitalism is the kind that’s in crisis today, and we say: Good riddance.”    Read the whole thing.

What would the late Milton Friedman have said about the current financial crisis?  That’s the question that Peter Robinson discusses in this piece in Forbes magazine with his colleagues, Thomas MaCurdy and Jay Bhattacharya, at the Hoover Institution with which Milton was affiliated during the last three decades of his life.  The discussion centers around these questions:

• Would Milton have seen this crisis coming?
• Whom would Milton have blamed?
• What would Milton have made of government efforts to address the crisis?
• What would Milton have seen as the principal danger to the economy that the crisis now poses?
• Would Milton have seen the crisis as a setback for capitalism?

Read and discuss!

“The financial crisis is a pointer to the fact that one cannot cheat the market- not for long!” exclaims James Shikwati, director of the Inter Region Economic Network in Kenya. In a recent African Executive article, Shikwati makes the case for the free market in the midst of the global financial crisis. He writes, “In a socialist system, no one would ever have discovered that the collapsed companies in America had a problem, taxpayers’ money would have kept them artificially in operation.” In response to whether the state should bail out collapsing companies, Shikwati gives a resounding, “No!” “Bailing out failure is an anti-market principle, since it will only perpetuate and gloss over the causes of the financial crisis.”

To read more, click here.

A Joint Statement from the European Free Market Community.

On Thursday, October 9th, thank tank members from across Europe joined together in Tbilisi, Georgia at the European Resource Bank Meeting to issue a statement concerning the current global financial crisis, an

d the resulting government intervention in financial institutions around the world

This statement makes the case, that a large portion of the blame for this crisis is placed in the hands of government, and poor regulations. they call for a retreat from government intervention as a solution to this problem, and instead offer a private, non governmental solution.

View the Press Release here, institute’s are welcome to translate this document and forward it to the media in your countries.

Additional signees to this document are encouraged, to add your signature please contact, Pierre Garello.

Atlas’s Gabriel Sanchez-Zinny was recently interviewed by Gabrial Salvia of CADAL (a think tank in Argentina). Salvia is the host of a weekly podcast called Apartura Latinoamericana. The program brings together analysts to discuss a variety of topics within the freedom movement. Zinny was asked to comment on the current US Presidential election and the recent financial crisis. Click here to listen to his analysis in Spanish!

Atlas recently moved our online toolkit to the new Google service, Knol. This service allows you to post articles on any given subject, and others are able to comment on, and edit those articles, much like wikipedia.

Other think tanks are using this new tool as well. Dan Mitchell of the Cato Institute has launched an online debate against John Irons of the Economic Policy Institute, concerning the United States’ Bailout of troubled banks. Readers are encouraged to chime in with their opinions here.

A week ago, Atlas conducted a successful event in Dallas, Texas.  The event, entitled “Risk in a Free Society”, was co-sponsored with the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a long time ally of Atlas which was also created by our founder Antony Fisher.  Although a variety of discussions emerged throughout the course of the event, the major focus was on the risk of terrorism, politics, and economics.  The conference opened with a great introduction by John Goodman (NCPA) and Alex Chafuen (Atlas), each addressing the threat of risk to free societies.  Mr. Goodman’s talk was in the context of the ever present entitlement crisis, and the risk that government imposes on society as it creates unfunded liabilities. Mr. Goodman’s major point was that this risk remains a looming threat, in which think tanks must remain vigilant so that this risk does not overwhelm our liberties.  Continuing with the role of think tanks, Mr. Chafuen added that in the quest for a free society, a think tank needs to decrease the risk of those engaging in the fight for freedom, and increase the risk of those endangering liberty and free enterprise. These two impactful opening remarks set the tone for the conference.

To address the risk of terrorism, we had two different panels with prominent experts such as Sebestyen Gorka, who founded the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS) in Hungary in 2003.  More recently, Mr. Gorka has been assigned to the National Defense University where he is conducting courses on terrorism.  Additionally, we had Steve Emerson who is the executive director of The Investigative Project on Terrorism and one of the leading authorities on Islamic extremist networks.  Both speakers made a “spirited” case for why we need to modernize our counterterrorism strategy and tactics to adapt to current challenges.   Conversely, Doug Bandow (American Conservative Defense Alliance) gave a broader perspective on what the tradeoff between security and freedom actually entails.

To discuss economic risks, we had distinguished speakers from various North American Institutions give a mixture of perspectives on issues ranging from the current U.S. financial crisis, to more general issues of risk and uncertainty in life.  Offering a perspective on the recent Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, NCPA brought their distinguished fellow – Bob McTeer.  Comments on his remarks were made in a previous post here.   Of mention, is a another presentation which made an interesting case for why think tanks exist. This presentation was given by Mike Walker of the Fraser Institute and the upshot of his talk was that since the biggest uncertainties are caused by governments, think tanks help mitigate the risk by offering a check on government power and make sense of the implications of government actions – as depicted by their internationally recognized annual report on the Economic Freedom of the World.

To bring more international flavor to the event, the discussions on political risks had a strong Latin American component.  The most prominent was our distinguished keynote speaker – Jorge Quiroga (former President of Bolivia) - who could not attend due to the prevailing political crisis that is ensuing in Bolivia.  However, the honorable Quiroga refused to cancel and called in during our luncheon presentation, to provide an uplifting analysis on the developments in Bolivia.  His overarching conclusion for Bolivia, is that hope is still alive pending some form of third party mediation can resolve their crisis.  To complement Quiroga’s talk we held a panel on “Turmoil in the Andes” where two long time friends of Atlas – Rocio Guijarro (Venezuela) and Armando Ribas (Argentina) shared their views of on the current situation.  Also on this panel, was a new intellectual entrepreneur - Roman Ortiz who directs the security and defense studies of the Fundacion Ideas Para la Paz (Ideas for Peace) in Colombia. These Latin American experts, generally agreed that the support for liberty in the Andes is being eroded by Hugo Chavez (or “Dr. Jeckyll”, as he was referred to in the presentation), Evo Morales (Bolivia), and Rafeal Correa (Ecuador).  Each has made significant gains to curtail freedoms in their respective countries by provoking constitutional attacks and implanting socialism.

For our luncheons, we provided two interesting talks on two distinct issues. The first presentation was given by our own Atlas Fellow and contributing editor of the National Review Online – Deroy Murdock.  Mr. Murdock discussed the rise of pork barrel spending in Congress and used the controversial “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska as an example.  Our second luncheon speaker touched on the recent conflict between Georgia and Russia. This presentation, given by Andrei Illarinov (Cato Institute Fellow), concluded our conference with a bang as he ran us through the history of the conflict and then pointed the blame exclusively towards Russia.  What made his analysis all the more interesting is the fact that Mr. Illarinov is the former Chief Economic Advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

All in all, the event was a success as we were able to shed light on various issues involving risk in a free society.  Our event preceded NCPA’s annual Gala dinner which featured guest speaker General (ret.) Tommy Franks who humored the audience with his charm and charisma as he shared his view on what it takes to be a leader in a free society.

This conference was a bit different than other Atlas events in that it had a major focus on security issues (i.e. terrorism, war, political violence).  Being that Atlas has an initiative through its Secure Free Society (SFS) program to address these types of issues, this conference sent a message to our entire think tank family that security topics should not be neglected, for they go hand in hand with our goals of advancing a global free society.

Joseph Humire is Atlas’s program manager for the Secure Free Societies Program, you can learn more about this program here.

With the bailout on most of our minds, Atlas Network TV put a emphasis on videos explaining the situation from a free-market perspective. Reason TV talked to economist Arnold Kling about “The Big Bailout.” Freedomworks issued a call-to-arms with their “Don’t Bail Out Bob — Or His Bank!” video. Finally, The Cato Institute released a compilation video of their experts discussing the Financial Crisis and the Bailout.

We also showed part 5 of the Collectivism vs. Individualism series and and video on Charting A Course to Liberty by the Pacific Legal Foundation.

As always, please rate and comment of videos that you like (or dislike). If you’d like to recommend a good free-market video please e-mail me or post a comment to this post. Contest winners could win as much as $5,000. Stay tuned to Atlas Network TV.