Today’s brilliant article on “progressivism” by Jim Ostrowski makes many important points, but one in particular would seem to prove the futility of the whole Koch brothers/Koch Foundation approach to public policy, i.e., producing mountains of studies intended to influence progressive journalists, congressional staffers, and politicians. (In sharp contrast to the strategy of the Mises Institute, which to educate the general public, especially students).
The important point that Ostrowski makes is that progressivism is “a self-imposed mental disability in which the progressive filters out of his perception and cognition any facts that disturb or disrupt the therapeutic function of his political mindset and at the same time highlights or exaggerates any facts that would appear to buttress the notion that government action can solve any particular problem.” Thomas Sowell’s book, The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, buttresses this point in spades. In chapter after chapter Sowell describes how decades of research critical of government policy toward crime, minimum wage laws, regulation, and myriad other topics are routinely just ignored by all progressives everywhere, especially in all government schools, from kindergarten to the universities.
Ostrowski gives several examples of this, but Sowell’s book contains dozens more. Together they prove Ostrowski’s point, with the obvious implication that all those mountains of “policy studies” produced by the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, and all the other DC “think tanks” have been one gigantic waste of time, effort, careers, and money. Has there ever even been one piece of legislation that causes a reduction of government in any way that has the name “Cato”or “Heritage” associated with it? Or is it more likely that the existence of such organizations provides the Washington establishment with a cover by creating the false impression that there is actually a policy debate in the nation’s capitol?
10:43 am on December 30, 2015
