Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

George Mason’s economics department, meanwhile, became a hotbed of controversial theories that began to transform Americans’ tax bills, serving as an incubator for the supply-side tax cuts in the Reagan administration that hugely advantaged the rich. Paul Craig Roberts, an adjunct professor at GMU, drafted a precursor to the first supply-side tax cut bill of the Reagan era, which was introduced by his former boss Congressman Jack Kemp. While these tax cuts starved the government, George Mason also belittled its role philosophically. A star on its faculty was James Buchanan, the founder of “public choice” theory, who often described his approach as “politics without romance” because he categorized elected officials and public servants as just another greedy, self-aggrandizing private interest group, a view popular with antigovernment libertarians. In 1986, Buchanan was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics. Liberal economists were aghast. Robert Lekachman, for instance, lambasted Buchanan for reducing “all human behavior to simple self-interest.” The prize nonetheless was an indisputable achievement, helping to put the school, and libertarianism, on the map. Julian Sanchez, a fellow at the Cato Institute, soon exalted George Mason as a “libertarian mecca,” saying, “It may well be the most heavily libertarian-staffed institution of higher education in the country.” Liberals, however, regarded the Kochs’ singular influence over the school with suspicion. “It’s ground zero for de...