Watching this system up close, all my worst suspicions about government were confirmed. When I later started the Mises Institute, I swore that it would not function the way party think-tanks in Britain do: as intellectual veneer to a gruesome system of legislative exploitation.
Washington has its own version, of course, and if anyone thinks Congressmen or their aides study some group’s “policy report” on this or that bill, he knows nothing about the imperial capital of the world. Its animating force is not ideas but graft, lies, and power. Those policy studies are for PR. On the other hand, there is a cost to treating the policy game as if it were some sort of intellectual club to which we all belong: it imbues the process with a moral legitimacy it does not deserve.
A scam was perfected in the early 1980s among leading politicians and the think-tanks. A group celebrates a politician’s supposed achievements in exchange for which the politician pretends to be influenced by the group. It’s all a public relations game. This is a major reason why Murray [Rothbard] was never able to work within that system. He had an irrepressible urge to tell the truth regardless of the consequences. Sure, he was a loose cannon, as any cannon should be on the ship of an imperial state.
Hyehudi.org
Reviving a Dead Religion Once Known as ‘Judaism’
