Right Wing Ideologues for Hire

Paul Krugman's December 19, 2005 column, the first two paragraphs of which are excerpted below, supports Carol Brightman's point in TOTAL INSECURITY: THE MYTH OF AMERICAN OMNIPOTENCE that the low wall that once existed between government and business has been trampled into dust.

Tankers on the Take
By PAUL KRUGMAN, NY Times Op-Ed Columnist, Dec. 19

Not long ago Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute for Policy Innovation, seemed on the verge of becoming a conservative icon. Before the Bush administration's sales pitch for Social Security privatization fell flat, admiring articles about the Bush plan's genesis often gave Mr. Ferrara credit for starting the privatization movement back in 1979.

Now Mr. Ferrara has become a different sort of icon. BusinessWeek Online reports that both Mr. Ferrara and Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, were paid by the ubiquitous Jack Abramoff to write "op-ed articles favorable to the positions of some of Abramoff's clients."

In the current regime this probably doesn't even qualify as an ethical breach. Since the "government" is now filled with right wing ideologues and former / future lobbyists and corporate execs who employ the intellectually and morally bankrupt rationalizations provided by places like the Cato Institute, it's hard to see where any ethical line would even exist. And since the economic "theories" they propound posit that government should give way to the Market God anyway, there's not even a theoretical reason to see government and business as different institutions with different ends.

Not surprising either is that the theories these right-wing think tankers have been hawking for the past 30 years serve to justify the constant expansion of benefits for the super-rich at the expense of benefits for anyone else. After all, these theories were commissioned by billionaire trust fund babies with names like Mellon Scaife and Coors. All in all, these "thinkers" are just following the money, which for them that amounts to a perfect alignment of personal, social, spirtual and economic goals.