Update: Glasner has retracted, saying he got his facts wrong. Unfortunate. It has no bearing on what I wrote, however.
As for Cato and Social Security: during the great debate of 2005, I went to Cato pages on the Social Security project, and found several which referred to pre-name-change conferences as being about “Social Security Choice” but before the name change — and which still had “privatization” in the source code. I talked about this at the time. I’m not surprised that they gave up, but it really happened.
David Glasner has an interesting post about how the Cato Institute suppressed an old paper of his, refusing either to publish it or release it for publication elsewhere, not for a few months, but for decades. What Glasner may not know or recall is that Cato has a long-standing habit of trying to send inconvenient history down the memory hole, in ways that — I’m sorry to say — are more consequential than the suppression of his thoughts on fiat money.
You see, back in the 1990s Cato had a long-standing project titled the Project on Social Security Privatization. Then they discovered that the term polled badly, and renamed it The Project on Social Security Choice. OK. But they also tried to pretend that they had never used the term privatization, which was clearly a liberal smear — and they went so far as to edit old web pages and records of old conferences to eliminate the term “privatization”, as if it had never been used. This was, by the way, in concert with the Bush administration, which was similarly trying to bully reporters into abandoning the term (with a fair bit of success).
I still sometimes run into people suggesting that Cato is a relatively honest if misguided operation, unlike the obvious hackery of Heritage. But it ain’t so, and never was.