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February 11 - March 26, 2019
Surely, he or she said, something had to be done about “the blatant political activities of the JBC.”35
They expressed alarm to the president and the provost that “the JBC tie with Koch may ‘politicize’” its members’ scholarship.
It’s not as if it were a secret to anyone how sleazy an operation Richie Fink had built with James C. Miller III, Buchanan’s former student, after his hire by Koch. Even the Wall Street Journal had run stories about how that joint project, Citizens for a Sound Economy, was operating in a “secretive” manner and claiming as members organizations that never consented to joining—using as “pawns” even the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.38
To maintain nominal academic integrity, Buchanan insisted on the divorce of his enterprise from the “outreach programs” of the Center for the Study of Market Processes. The Koch people agreed and moved all their various programs to the Arlington campus of GMU, where the School of Law was already situated, bringing them even closer to Washington, D.C.
all four “fellows” of the Buchanan Center were acting as political hands, including Wendy Lee Gramm, James Miller, and another GMU alumnus, Dr. Jerry Ellig, who worked with Miller on Citizens for a Sound Economy.
The new staff had shown terrible judgment in advertising the “Chief of Staff Weekend Retreats” at which figures such as sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and “experts” from such think tanks as Cato and Reason addressed “senior congressional staff” on “a variety of important policy issues, while maintaining relevance to the legislative calendar.” And ordinary Web surfers, to say nothing of IRS employees, did not need to know that the Buchanan Center had been tutoring top legislative staff in such areas as strategies for privatizing Social Security and Medicare, “downsizing
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But when Buchanan went one step further and tried to bring the GMU administration over to his way of thinking by warning the top leaders of the university that Fink’s center was out of control—quite literally, “since there is no one with academic standing involved at all”—he got nowhere. GMU had never been offered a larger gift, reported the Washington Post.44
Jim Buchanan effectively retired to the log cabin where he had first convened his Third Century project. When he died in 2013, neither Koch nor Fink, nor Cowen nor Meese, bothered to attend his memorial service.47 Why should they? His days of his usefulness to them had passed.
freely chosen, mutually valued exchange. But what Rowley saw—up close—was two equally troubling patterns that did not square with that way of thinking. First, the sheer scale of the riches the “wealthy individuals” brought to bear turned out to have subtle, even seductive, power. And second, under the influence of one wealthy individual in particular, the movement was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through trickery, through deceiving trusting people about its real intentions in order to take them to a place where, on their own, given complete
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Rowley said what others never dared to admit: “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.”
“Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”6
In the end, though, Rowley’s loyalty was to the cause, not to his adopted country. (He was born and educated in England.) He was concerned about Cato, not America, and certainly not the fate of majority rule. Neither he nor any other insider ever went public with their concerns.
In the shock-and-awe-style coordinated push to implement radical change in record time, without customary transparency or deliberative process, is it any wonder that no one noticed how many of the leading operatives in this vast project had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially at Buchanan’s last home, George Mason University? No. Nor is it any wonder that in the scramble to keep up with all the action, no one inquired about the source of the ideas that made these efforts cohere or identified their endgame. Surely, this was just partisan hardball played with
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Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering and you will hear endless cries about the “moocher class.”11 Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the “parasite economy” that divides us into “the predators and the prey.”12 Addressing an audience of
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Charles Koch has always argued that his vision of a good society will bring prosperity to all. But his trusted cadre, the people he relies upon to justify and advance his messianic vision, apparently believe otherwise. They have sketched out the society that will emerge if their cause succeeds (while wiping their own fingerprints from the story of its emergence).
People who failed to foresee and save money for their future needs, Buchanan wrote in 2005, “are to be treated as subordinate members of the species, akin to . . . animals who are dependent.”15
Less well known is that these zealots do not believe that the government should be involved in trying to promote public health, period. We are not talking about subsidized hip replacements and birth control. We are talking about things like basic sanitation, something governments have committed to since the Progressive Era as the single most important measure to stop waterborne epidemics such as cholera and typhoid.
Thom Tillis, a North Carolina state senator elevated to the U.S. Senate in 2014 with backing from the Koch apparatus, has said that restaurants should be able “to opt out of” laws requiring employees to wash their hands after using the toilet, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.’ The market will take care of that.”20
What happened in Flint was not a natural disaster. Nor a case of governmental incompetence. What happened there was directly attributable to the prodding of the Mackinac Center, one of the first Koch-funded—and in this case, Koch-staffed—state-level “think and do” tanks that now exist in all fifty states and are affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), also Koch-concocted, to coordinate efforts to prevent state governments from responding to the demands of the “takers.”24
To save money, Flint’s appointed city manager switched the source of the city water supply to the polluted Flint River. The Mackinac Center lobbyists, by the way, made sure that the law incorporated provisions to protect the appointed managers from lawsuits.
Back in 1997, for example, the same year that Charles Koch made his first big contribution to George Mason, yet another Koch operation, Citizens for a Sound Economy, warned its corporate allies that 76 percent of Americans thought of themselves as environmentalists. “Worse, 65 percent” told industry pollsters that they “do not trust business” to take action against pollution, and “79 percent of voters think current regulations are about right or ‘not strict enough.’”27
So what was to be done? “It might be hard to admit,” said the chair of the economics department at George Mason, Donald J. Boudreaux, but because public choice showed that a government cure would be worse (from their perspective, of course) than the disease, global warming “is best left alone.”28
To put all this another way: if the Koch-network-funded academics and institutions were not in the conversation, the public would have little doubt that the evidence of science is overwhelming and government action to prevent further global warming is urgent.36 Sadly, however, their campaigns are working. The number of Americans who believed that “the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate” dropped from 71 percent in 2007 to 44 percent in 2011.37
Just as the radical right seeks, ultimately, to turn public education over to corporations, so it pushes for corporate prisons. The mission seems important enough that Alexander Tabarrok, a GMU economist then moonlighting as research director for the Koch-funded Independent Institute, issued a whole book on the subject in 2003, with the coy title Changing the Guard. “We now know that private prisons can be built more quickly, operated at lower cost, and maintained at a quality level at least as high as government-run prisons,” Tabarrok announced. While warning of “special-interest groups, in
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The solution to every problem—from young people loaded down with student loan debt to the care of infants and toddlers and the sick and the elderly—is for each individual to think, from the time they are sentient, about their possible future needs and prepare for them with their own earnings, or pay the consequences. Indeed, George Mason’s Tyler Cowen and a Mercatus colleague told young Americans a few years ago that they “should not be occupying Wall Street, they should be occupying AARP” (to keep retirees from taking from them).54
“The harsh reality is that the majority of today’s workforce—probably the large majority—are heading toward increasingly difficult and, in some cases, financially disastrous retirements.” The researchers also show, however, that this bleak future does not need to be. Social Security “remains the most widespread, effective, secure, and significant source of retirement income” for the vast majority of Americans. To stave off the crisis, the need is precisely the opposite of what the libertarian cadre argues: the nation’s social insurance system should be expanded to compensate for the spread of
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“The freest countries have not generally been democratic,” Cowen noted, with Chile being “the most successful” in securing freedom (defined not as most of us would, as personal freedom, but as supplying the greatest economic liberty).
“The weakening of the checks and balances” in the American system, Cowen suggested, “would increase the chance of a very good outcome.” Alas, given the pervasive reverence for the U.S. Constitution, a direct bid to manipulate the system could prove “disastrous.” Cowen’s best advice, informed by the Chilean experience, was sudden percussive policy bombing, akin in nature, one could say, to the military doctrine of shock and awe, which uses colossal displays of force and calculated interlinked maneuvers to shock the enemy into submission. When the right opportunity arose, the economist advised,
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In the meantime, shaping public opinion was crucial. Efforts should probably focus on men, because they “are more likely to think like economists,” whereas women tend to anticipate the downside of economic liberty and so support government intervention. Research being done at George Mason also suggested a good deal of irrationality in the electorate, which could be turned to advantage. “It might be possible for ‘irrationally held’ views to in fact support good policies,” particularly if the cause were to enlist insights from “cognitive science and perhaps evolutionary biology.” Knowledge of
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But two of the country’s most distinguished comparative political scientists, Alfred Stepan and Juan J. Linz, recently approached the puzzle of U.S. singularity in another way: they compared the number of stumbling blocks that advanced industrial democracies put in the way of their citizens’ ability to achieve their collective will through the legislative process. Calling these inbuilt “majority constraining” obstacles “veto players,” the two scholars found a striking correlation: the nations with the fewest veto players have the least inequality, and those with the most veto players have the
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“This is among the most profound shifts in our legal history,” warns a Reagan-appointed federal judge. His words bear slow reading: “Ominously, business has a good chance of opting out of the legal system altogether and misbehaving without reproach.” A subsequent headline noted that it amounts to a “Privatization of the Justice System.”73
But in the Affordable Care Act case, Roberts, who in his first year on the bench did more to limit the reach of Brown v. Board of Education than any previous justice, commented that “the Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave” (a proposition no one has suggested).
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in her opinion, rightly picked up on that surprising assertion, calling the chief justice’s claim “stunningly retrogressive.”
A Stanford law professor dubbed Roberts’s ruling “a loaded gun.”81 Faculty at the George Mason School of Law, now aptly named after Antonin Scalia, are urging the court to fire it by going back to its pre-1937 jurisprudence, when the justices routinely struck down government action to advance popular economic security or social justice goals.82
After America elected its first black president, operatives throughout the apparatus and their allied officeholders systematically kindled the irrational conviction that Barack Obama had won through massive voter “fraud,” and that, unless a battery of new laws prevented it, such fraud would be used to “steal” more elections. This was the cadre at its most cynical. But so avidly has this big lie been spread that nearly half of registered voters, and even federal judges and Supreme Court justices, came to believe that fraud was a big problem—and cases have been decided on those fallacious
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In the two years after Republican candidates swept the 2010 midterm elections, ALEC-backed legislators in forty-one states introduced more than 180 bills to restrict who could vote and how.
“Without the protection of a fairly drawn district, the citizen is a pawn of billionaires who use the map of the country” to get what they want.
