1 Boring Old Man

The American Enterprise Institute
The Project for the New American Century
The Federalist Society
The National Republican Lawyers Association
The Heritage Foundation
The Hudson Institute
The Manhattan Institute

The idea of having a collective of bright people thinking together is an old one – the University, the College, a Legislature, etc. It’s the lynch-pin of science – the Pasteur Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the CDC, CERN, the Manhattan Project, ARPA, NASA, etc. The first Policy Institute in my experience was the RAND Corporation, a military policy "think tank" that started as part of Douglas Aircraft, but became independent.

But things have changed. We now have think tanks everywhere – tax exempt "institutes" that claim to have lofty, academic goals and call their members "scholars," but which function as ideological lobby groups. SourceWatch is a group that keeps up with such groups:

The nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy‘s SourceWatch website argues that think tanks are organizations "…that clai[m] to serve as a center for research and/or analysis of important public issues…are little more than public relations fronts…generating self-serving scholarship that serves the advocacy goals of their industry sponsors." It calls think tanks "phony institutes where ideologue~propagandists pose as academics … [into which] money gushes like blood from opened arteries to support meaningless advertising’s suffocation of genuine debate". SourceWatch argues that a think tank’s research findings can tend to be in "…accordance with the interests of its funders." SourceWatch claims that an "…important functions of think tanks is to provide a backdoor way for wealthy business interests to promote their ideas or to support economic and sociological research not taking place elsewhere that they feel may turn out in their favor."

SourceWatch comments that while think tank’s researchers have "… titles such as "senior fellow" or "adjunct scholar," but this does not necessarily mean that they even possess an academic degree in their area of claimed expertise." SourceWatch claims that "think tanks are like universities…minus the systems of peer review and other mechanisms that academia uses to promote diversity of thought. Real academics are expected to conduct their research first and draw their conclusions second, but this process is often reversed at most policy-driven think tanks."

I don’t too much care if people who like to be with each other "hang out together." I don’t even mind rich people giving them money to "hang out together." What I object to is their being tax exempt and to their influencing our policies secretly. And this latter thing is what has happened in the last twenty years. We’re seeing it in spades in the DoJ Scandal, but it’s true of the whole Bush Administration, which is essentially a coalition of Right Wing "think tanks."

In my opinion, this is where our focus should turn. A ‘Think Tank’ with an ideological agenda would be better named a ‘Cess Pool.’ There is absolutely no reason for such organizations with a political agenda to be tax exempt. It’s a free country, but if we’re taxing corporations, and people, and retired Social Security recipients – we should tax these groups – Left and Right. They’ve earned the right to pay for the luxury of sitting around pushing their agendae. Non-Proifit should be something you have to prove. The term is incompatible with Political or Ideological. Likewise, religious organizations with a political agenda should also be taxed…