Thomas Gordon Palmer (/ˈpɑːlmər/; born 1956, Bitburg-Mötsch, West Germany) is an American libertarian author and theorist, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and Vice President for International Programs at the Atlas Network.

He has been editor of several publications, including Dollars & Sense (the newspaper of the National Taxpayers Union), Update, and the Humane Studies Review, and has published articles in such newspapers and magazines as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Spectator of London, National Review, Slate, Ethics, and the Cato Journal.

[6] Palmer is a Senior Fellow of the Cato Institute, where he was previously also Vice President for International Programs and director of its Center for the Promotion of Human Rights.

He traveled throughout the region to hold seminars and smuggled books, cash, photocopiers, and fax machines from an office in Vienna, Austria.

[9] He arranged for translation and publication into a variety of central and eastern European languages of textbooks in economics and law, as well as seminal works by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other thinkers in the libertarian and liberal traditions.

He served as editor for The Morality of Capitalism: What Your Professors Won't Tell You, which was published in 2011 and featured essays from Nobel Prize winners Mario Vargas Llosa and Vernon L. Smith, Whole Foods Market CEO and founder John Mackey, and scholars from around the world.

Palmer is also the editor of Peace, Love & Liberty, a book published in 2014 that features selected writings from Radley Balko, Steven Pinker, Jeffrey Miron, and others.

He was a plaintiff in Parker v. District of Columbia, a successful lawsuit in Washington, D.C. to secure the right to own a handgun in one's home, based on the text of the Second Amendment to the U.S.