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Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Ayatollah
Santorum the Sanctimonious (ASS)
The word on the street (K Street, that is) is that Charles Koch's lawsuit
against the CATO Institute is motivated by his desire to abandon what he once
believed was a potentially successful Grand Strategy and replace it with a
different institutional strategy. The Grand Strategy was explained to me back
in the early 1980s by Richard Fink, the longtime head of the Koch Foundation,
when we were both young assistant professors of economics at George Mason
University (and before Richie was with the Koch Foundation). The strategy was
to use institutions such as George Mason to educate undergraduate and
graduate students in free-market economics who would then work for various
arms of the Kochtopus, for members of congress or the executive branch, or
become journalists or elected officials themselves. In other words, the
strategy was all about influencing or taking over the Washington
Establishment.
Well, this strategy has had a 35-year run and is obviously a colossal
failure. There has never been any single law or regulation that is known as
the "CATO Rule," or the "CATO law to deregulate industry
X," etc. The welfare/warfare state has exploded beyond the control of
anyone over the past several administrations despite all those CATO
conferences, all those rubber chicken lunches and dinners, and all of the
juvenile sniping at and gossiping/lying about the Rothbardians associated
with the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com who have done nothing but pursue
an alternative educational strategy.
That strategy was always to educate the general public, especially the
young, in Austrian economics and Austrian social theory. This was Murray
Rothbard's preferred strategy, and it is a big reason why Charles Koch and Ed
Crane kicked him out of the CATO Institute despite the fact that he was one
of the original founders, came up with the name, and was an original
"shareholder." In other words, Murray's strategy was to devote
educational efforts to educating people like the millions of young (and
not-so-young) Ron Paul supporters that we now read about on a daily basis
(and whose existence reportedly infuriates Charles Koch). It was never to
pretend that it was possible to take over the Washington establishment.
Murray was never so naive as to believe in such a fool's errand. He believed
instead that the opposite was much more likely to occur: that the Washington
establishment would force CATO to compromise its principles as the price of
being treated "respectfully" by the likes of the company newspaper,
the Washington Post. He understood that the Washington establishment would
only use an institution like CATO to fool the public into believing that
there is actually a public policy debate in Washington, and that it is not
just a matter of choosing minor, miniscule variations of the combination of
welfare/warfare statism when choosing between the two political parties.
CATO began compromising its principles the moment it moved from San
Francisco to Washington, D.C. At the time, I was an adjunct scholar of CATO. Within
about a year or so I began sending op-ed articles to Jeff Tucker at the Mises
Institute, and giving presentations at Mises Institute conferences organized
by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell, because everything I sent to CATO was
all-of-a-sudden watered down so much that it sounded more like something
coming out of the liberal Brookings Institution. CATO's publications editor
at the time seemed embarrassed that the op-eds I was sending him, at his
request, were constantly being returned to me with such heavy editing by an
anonymous person (to me) who seemed to be on the same ideological wave length
as a leftist like Ted Kennedy or a neocon like Newt Gingrich. I was
apparently too much of a Misesian and not enough of an intellectual
prostitute for CATO, so they dropped me as an adjunct scholar the same week
that they dropped Professor Ralph Raico for the same reason.
Murray Rothbard was right, and Charles Koch's lawsuit against the CATO
Institute inadvertently admits it.
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