A recent front-page headline in the Washington Examiner proclaimed, “Economic downturn ensnares area think tanks.” The Examiner cited a reduction in foundation endowments as putting the squeeze on venerable organizations like the Brookings Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. For example, “The Brookings Institute’s endowment has lost nearly a quarter of its value in the last few months,” while the Center for Strategic and International Studies “has imposed a hiring freeze and it trying to cut costs by up to 15 percent.” Even the still-fully-funded think tanks are in crisis mode:
The Heritage Foundation will raise enough to meet its $61 million 2008 budget, Vice President John von Kannon said, but the group is now in get-lean mode: Starting next year, the foundation will review its income and expenses every month. “We’ll be more like a business,” von Kannon said. [Capital Research Center president Terrence] Scanlon hasn’t cut staff, but he says he has added a new ritual to close out the week. “On Fridays, I’m checking each thermostat,” he said. “It’s going down for the weekend.”
So are the boom times over? The Examiner notes, “Since the 1970s, the number of think tanks in the Washington area has grown exponentially, from only a dozen or so groups to 340 today.” But perilous economic times could benefit some pro-government think tanks, since they can simply rely on more taxpayer funds and “grants”. (And some, like Brookings, can expect their “scholars” to be hired by the government.) Libertarian and conservative think tanks that reject direct state funding, however, could face extinction.That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Like the near-death newspaper industry, think tanks have always overstated their importance to civil society. Both institutions share a romantic self-image that frequently transgresses into narcissism. Consider this loving self-tribute from Art Thiel, a columnist for the soon-to-close Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Lamentable as a one-newspaper town would be, a no-newspaper town is an assault on democracy and civic well-being.
Most of us who get into the business do so with more than a dollop of do-goodism. Whether it’s our paper, or their paper, or one across the country, that smacks truth to power, we newsies revel in the deed. To understand the pride and purpose, all any citizen needs to recall is The Washington Post’s scalding revelations about what awaited wounded veterans of the Iraq war at the Army’s Walter Reed hospital. Sometimes, hard truths scream to be told loudly, and there is virtually only one instrument in our culture for the job — the professional newsroom.
This is, of course, utter nonsense. Newspapers have long been the backbone of the state. Just last year, I spoke to a venerated Washington Post columnist about his deliberate failure to report an abuse of power by a federal regulator. The columnist told me, point blank, that he would do nothing to undermine the actions of an agency he supported. As for Thiel’s example of the Post’s reporting on Walter Reed hospital – tell me, Mr. Thiel, where was the Post’s vaunted newsroom during the buildup to the war that put those soldiers in the hospital?
Now as for think tanks, they similarly inflate their own importance while maintaining close ties to the state. In the Examiner article, Cato’s David Boaz proclaimed, “You’ve got a Republican administration nationalizing banks. You’ve got a Democratic administration saying, ‘They’re not going to do enough. Cato’s ideas are needed more than ever.” Setting aside the question of whether “Cato’s ideas” are unique and proprietary, it’s not like Cato has been a lone voice crying “stop” in the face of statism. As our own Lew Rockwell has written,
In the typical state-Beltway think tank exchange, the state pretends to be influenced by the think tank so that the think tank can get donations from big businessmen who want face time with state officials. Cato, for example, has hosted [Alan] Greenspan and [Ben] Bernanke at its functions, and at intimate gatherings with big donors. But there is another part of the deal. When the crunch comes, as after 9/11 or now, the think tanks back state aggrandizement. Cato, for example, now endorses bank nationalization. This is extremely useful to the bad guys. If “libertarians” are for a state power grab, who can be against it? Besides the Austrian economists and the real libertarians, that is.
Along those same lines, Thomas DiLorenzo observed,
Hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the D.C. “think tanks” over the past 30 years under the theory that if the Washington establishment and its media megaphones are bombarded with conservative or libertarian studies, papers, books, and speeches, they will become less socialistic. The experiment has failed. The Washington establishment proceeds on the ruinous route to socialism as though Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, F.A, Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and other classical liberal giants never existed. It’s time for all of them to pack up and go home.
A truly free-market or libertarian think tank should look towards building a new civil society, rather then reinforcing the state. The traditional think tank model, the Examiner noted, was a “university without students.” But that’s precisely the wrong approach. A university without students is just a bunch of over-credentialed academics arguing among themselves. The goal should be a university where everyone is the student. Disseminating ideas to the widest possible audience – instead of a self-selected group of elites who never apply the ideas anyhow – must be the objective going forward. And, frankly, none of the Washington-based groups are capable of this.
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I suspect that politicians are rarely, if ever, influenced by think tanks. Rather, they use think tanks as a source of “facts” that support the positions they already have.
We should emulate the “Alpha Course” of the UK Christians (I’m an atheist, don’t take this for anything more that a call to copy methods and forms).
See wiki and their web site
The real key is to develop a program of educator education and take that to the masses like evangelical Christianity (or at least the low temperature uk form of that). Person by person, group by group, town by town.
What we’ve been doing for a 150 years is publishing – pamphleteering, periodicals, books – It didn’t work. We need something else. F–k the think tanks, f–k the intellectuals – take it to the people.
Why it didn’ t work doesn’t matter. It just didn’t. Perhaps is was the rise of cheap printing and thus cheap books, novels and magazines (Dickens, London and Wells) but who cares. It failed. We didn’t get access to Radio or Movies or TV.
Maybe this will change in the demassified age of the internet and of “convergence”. I don’t think so though. Our voices will be drowned out with crap and propaganda.
We – or at least I – often wish for an educated peoples. Lazy. We need to educate the people. We need to get out and deliver economic education from the bottom up.
The think tanks are about aiming to take the argument to the “intellectuals” but the intellectuals are suborned and subvert by employment by the state – in fact the state employs all the intellectuals (mostly as teachers). They are not, as a class, reachable since their economic interests lie in the perpetuation of the state.
We must instead create new intellectualls, outwith the state appartus and teaching machinery outside state reach and, well teach.
Go out and teach economics as the followers of Christs went and preached his message. Take it to the people in every way you can.
Riddle with typos. Sorry.
I hate the web. Needs a lot of work.
Just like the ‘gold standard’ is used to refer to that point against which things are judged, often used in advertising to stimulate comparisons between different products, there is a statesman against which all politicians are to be compared. Ron Paul, because he is an Austrian economist and a classical liberal, is the equivalent of the gold standard in the test of think tanks.
The think tanks that blow with the winds created by the counterfeiting by the unConstitutional coup are easily assayed.
Do think tank guys have big heads? The ‘gold standard’ question is ” Do they have ethics?” What are their thoughts about counterfeiting, intervention, imperialism, private property, liberty, and Ron Paul?
I think the author misses an important part of what policy related non-profits do. Outside of our libertarian bubble our ideas are often seen by the public at large as ridiculous and impractical. The work by these think-tanks goes a long way to applying our liberty minded science to practical problems and offering solutions. This is one way of convincing the public that our ideas are actually relevant.
Mass confusion through bad marketing. Take the Cato Institute, probably the best known economic “think tank” in D.C. The problem is people believe it to be a conservative economic institution when it is really a libertarian/chicago school hybrid. Cato considers themselves to be libertarian yet they defend the Federal Reserve and endorse carbon taxes? Regardless they do a good job of getting their commentary articles published in major newspapers which the public does read. Whether you agree with major newspapers or not, getting your ideas published in them is an easy way to reach new independent thinkers. As far as I know Cato has been the only major “libertarian” institution to be successful at this. To make things worse their articles are not always very good so it is tough to say how much influence they are really having.
The public at large has next to no idea of the ideology of most of the think tanks. Libertarian and Conservative organizations are constantly confused. The public largely doesn’t even know what a Libertarian is. Knee-jerk conservatives think Libertarians are liberals. So there is an education gap out there that needs to be corrected.
Conservative think tanks like AEI and Heritage for whatever reason appear to have more influence with Republicans, they also get published in the WSJ and with FOX News. This again is better marketing and something the better Libertarian Institutions need to consider. You have absolutely no major newspaper or news organization giving true libertarian views outside of John Stossel on 20/20. This is a big problem.
Do these think-tanks have big heads? Definitely, which is why they have attorneys and non-academics writing economic briefs. Mises has a huge resource pool of Ph.D. economists and professors that no one else has. In coordination with other like minded institutions like the Independent Institute and the right marketing you guys should have no problem reaching a wider audience than the failing think-tanks.
In addition to a huge resource pool of Ph.D. economists and professors, Mises does economic books better than anyone else. You cannot buy these at local book stores but you can buy Krugman! It is maddening to walk into Borders and not be able to find a single decent economics book to read (not entirely true I found ONE book by Hayek buried in the Politics section). No wonder nobody understands economics, they are all reading the wrong books!
Without question D.C. think tanks have been an utter failure and it is time for Libertarian organizations to rethink their marketing campaign.
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