With the current rec list diary in defense of Rush Limbaugh, I felt it was time to call attention to another crisis that we need to attend to - the destruction of the Cato Institute.
By the Koch brothers. Really. And it is actually serious.
More past the orange bee-dance chart.
This is becoming a huge controversy in intellectual Libertarian circles, and perhaps it should become one here. As noted in The New York Times article on this from March 6th notes:
The rift has its roots, Cato officials said, in a long-simmering feud over efforts by Mr. Koch and his brother David Koch to install their own people on the institute’s 16-member board and to establish a more direct pipeline between Cato and the family’s Republican political outlets, including groups that Democrats complain have mounted a multimillion-dollar assault on President Obama. Tensions reached a new level with a lawsuit filed last week by the Kochs against Cato over its governing structure.
Why should we care? As Alex Pareene
commented in an article on Salon.Com from May 5th, (and as quoted on the
Save Cato web page)
[Y]ou should wish for an independent Cato Institute even if — maybe especially if — you're a socialist statist tool (like me). Cato is mostly antiwar, decidedly anti-drug war, and sponsors a lot of good work on civil liberties. That ... is basically what the Kochs don't like about them, because white papers on decriminalization don't help Republicans get elected.
Cato has, overall, a good reputation as a source for information on the libertarian viewpoint. I may not agree with a lot of what the Cato Institute has put out, but at least they are independent and their work is usually consistent with a strong (but conservative) libertarian outlook. A corporate-controlled Cato Institute would likely function as a corporate shill - one with existing gravitas from its previous work as an independent institute.
Personally, I don't want their reputation being thrown behind a purely Republican agenda, since it could easily give more credence to discredited ideas, solely because of the Cato Institute label. But, what to do?
Take a look at the Save the Cato Institute Facebook page, maybe visit the Save Cato web page, read some of the links from there (they are informative), and enjoy the inadvertent humor. As Alex also noted in his Salon article:
One mildly amusing side effect of all this has been a bunch of pro-Cato libertarians continuing to mock liberals for imagining the Kochs to be powerful and nefarious while … bemoaning their insidious plot to destroy Cato from the inside.
