What no one likely expected was Buchanan’s reaction. “Quite frankly, I am ‘pissed off,’” he told Fink. What was being done under his name “verges on fraud and surely, at a minimum amounts to exploitation of me, of you, of JBC, of the university.”37
But why the moral outrage? Buchanan knew exactly who Richie Fink was. Years earlier he had recommended him personally to Koch, knowing him to be an operator who made things happen without worrying much about standard norms of conduct. It’s not as if it were a secret to anyone how sleazy an operation Richie Fink had built with James C. Miller III, Buchanan’s former student, after his hire by Koch. Even the Wall Street Journal had run stories about how that joint project, Citizens for a Sound Economy, was operating in a “secretive” manner and claiming as members organizations that never consented to joining—using as “pawns” even the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.38 CSE was run right under Buchanan’s nose, moreover, with both men on the payroll of George Mason as they politicked in Washington, Fink as research associate professor at George Mason, mysteriously released from teaching, and Miller running for a U.S. Senate seat while a John M. Olin fellow at Buchanan’s center.39 And the whole new George Mason scheme had been worked out in its broad contours in “lengthy discussions” at the Cato Institute and over “days at the Mont Pelerin Society meetings.”40
Buchanan had been played like a fine fiddle. Richie Fink had grandly predicted to him that with Koch’s support, the new Buchanan Center at GMU would have “the scholarly impact of the University of Chicago and the outreach credibility and impact of the Kennedy School of Government,” knowing that Buchanan had repeatedly expressed his irritation at always finding himself in Milton Friedman’s shadow and hated the Kennedy family. Did Buchanan ask himself now if anyone, even Koch’s operatives, would have had the nerve to use Friedman’s name as they had used his, without his knowledge or permission?
Although far more politically engaged throughout his entire academic career than he ever publicly admitted, he chose to tell himself that this debacle was all the fault of others. “Embarrassed personally,” incensed “by the usurpation of authority” that had exposed him to shame, and fearing that no matter what attempts were made to ameliorate the situation, the integrity of the research program he had spent four decades developing had been seriously, perhaps permanently, damaged, he refused to have anything further to do with the operatives in Fink’s orbit.41
Alas, the colleague to whom Buchanan looked for support was Tyler Cowen, just appointed general director of the Buchanan Center, the “front-man role,” in the words of one academic insider. The son of a Goldwater Republican who had served as president of the local chamber of commerce and “became an increasingly radical libertarian,” Cowen had been introduced by his father to key leaders and organizations of the cause as an adolescent. The young Cowen met Richie Fink at the age of fifteen at Austrian economics seminars in New York, came up through Koch’s Institute for Humane Studies, and followed Fink to George Mason in 1980 as an undergraduate, before heading off to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. “I learned more from Rich than is possible to say,” he later gushed, not only about economics “but also about institution building, strategy, personalities and many other matters.” Fink was a “role model” for him. But Cowen knew something of strategy himself, having been a chess lover from the age of ten. He was already a key player in the project to create an academic base camp for the libertarian revolution. As both a true believer and a so far undistinguished researcher whose career was taking off thanks to Koch largesse, he was not about to alter the ship’s course. By self-description autistic and an “upper-middle-class white male who all his life felt like he belonged to the dominant group,” Cowen was not inclined to sentimentality or solidarity.42
To maintain nominal academic integrity, Buchanan insisted on the divorce of his enterprise from the “outreach programs” of the Center for the Study of Market Processes. The Koch people agreed and moved all their various programs to the Arlington campus of GMU, where the School of Law was already situated, bringing them even closer to Washington, D.C. The incoming team also agreed to strip the self-aggrandizing titles from power-grabbing nonacademic operatives, even as these operatives moved up the organizational hierarchy, and to take down the Web site boasting of the “Programs for Policymakers,” so as not to invite prosecution. It would not do to show on the staff listing that an academic center had a director of congressional programs, Lawson Bader, who had no plausible connection with academic economics—or to let the world know that all four “fellows” of the Buchanan Center were acting as political hands, including Wendy Lee Gramm, James Miller, and another GMU alumnus, Dr. Jerry Ellig, who worked with Miller on Citizens for a Sound Economy. The new staff had shown terrible judgment in advertising the “Chief of Staff Weekend Retreats” at which figures such as sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and “experts” from such think tanks as Cato and Reason addressed “senior congressional staff” on “a variety of important policy issues, while maintaining relevance to the legislative calendar.” And ordinary Web surfers, to say nothing of IRS employees, did not need to know that the Buchanan Center had been tutoring top legislative staff in such areas as strategies for privatizing Social Security and Medicare, “downsizing government,” and promoting unlimited campaign spending as a form of free speech.43
But when Buchanan went one step further and tried to bring the GMU administration over to his way of thinking by warning the top leaders of the university that Fink’s center was out of control—quite literally, “since there is no one with academic standing involved at all”—he got nowhere. GMU had never been offered a larger gift, reported the Washington Post.44
“We are determined to pursue this initiative,” Provost David Potter informed Buchanan; indeed, he and the president made clear that they wanted to better “align the Department of Economics with the Buchanan Center.”45 In other words, they wanted to do still more to please Koch, even subordinating an academic department to the political project. As long as there was money on the table, they were not about to forgo it.
When the waters calmed, Ed Meese, now the rector of GMU’s Board of Visitors, charged with university oversight, awarded Charles Koch and James Buchanan each a George Mason Medal, the institution’s highest honor, for contributions to “our nation and the world.”46 But the Nobel Laureate was too savvy not to know that this and the minor changes made at his request were face-saving gestures to soothe his wounded pride. He was no longer in charge, not even of the center that bore his name. Rather than face such a future, Jim Buchanan effectively retired to the log cabin where he had first convened his Third Century project. When he died in 2013, neither Koch nor Fink, nor Cowen nor Meese, bothered to attend his memorial service.47 Why should they? His days of his usefulness to them had passed.
With a respectable base camp secured, minutes from the capital, Koch would turn to assembling the kind of force that had propelled Columbus—this time, to put democracy in chains.
PART III
THE FALLOUT
CONCLUSION
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“What happens if individuals do not value liberty sufficiently highly?” James Buchanan’s colleague and friend Charles K. Rowley asked after the failure of the Reagan revolution. “Should they be forced to be free?”1
Rowley was not an outside critic. He was a dedicated libertarian who had been part of the Virginia school of political economy since joining the George Mason economics department in 1984. At the time of his death, in 2013, he was working on a biography of James Buchanan, whom he still deeply admired. Indeed, with words perhaps prescient, he depicted Buchanan as “perhaps the most hated and feared enemy of left-leaning economists throughout the world.”2
As for his question about those who did not share the cause’s zeal, we do not know whether anyone answered it explicitly or whether those answers satisfied his concerns. What we do know is that by th
e opening of the new century, he seems to have become more uneasy about the movement’s direction. As the Mont Pelerin Society was making plans to celebrate its golden anniversary in Washington, D.C., Rowley refused invitations from Edwin J. Feulner, head of the Heritage Foundation, to serve on the host committee. He told him frankly that he did not like what big money was doing to an organization that had once focused on ideas. The “large subsidies from corporations” and “wealthy individuals” led to “extravagant junketing” that disturbed him. “This was not the original intent of Friedrich von Hayek” in creating the society, Rowley protested. “Too many meetings are now dominated by wealthy individuals, foundation executives and the like.”3
Rowley did not detail the corruption of purpose that unsettled him, at least not in the documents I’ve been able to find, but it’s not difficult to read between the lines in order to understand his confusion. The core claim of this movement—certainly Buchanan’s core claim going all the way back to Brown—was that government did not have the right to “coerce” the individual, beyond the basic level of the rule of law and public order. If liberty, as Buchanan and others in the movement would use that term, had any hard and fast meaning, it lay in the conviction that every person, up to the very wealthiest among us, had the same right to control the earnings of his own labor as he saw fit, even when the majority thought that this money might be put to better use serving the public interest. In the movement’s view, government was the realm of coercion, and the market was the realm of freedom, of freely chosen, mutually valued exchange.
But what Rowley saw—up close—was two equally troubling patterns that did not square with that way of thinking. First, the sheer scale of the riches the “wealthy individuals” brought to bear turned out to have subtle, even seductive, power. And second, under the influence of one wealthy individual in particular, the movement was turning to an equally troubling form of coercion: achieving its ends essentially through trickery, through deceiving trusting people about its real intentions in order to take them to a place where, on their own, given complete information, they probably would not go. This was not classical liberalism, no matter how often cadre members claimed that mantle. When you combine the emerging deceitful and therefore coercive strategy—one that owed much to James Buchanan—with the fact that those attending the Mont Pelerin Society golden anniversary meeting, intellectuals and operatives alike, were ever more beholden for their sustenance to a single man, Rowley’s discomfort is easy to explain. It is a contradiction in terms to remain a self-governing intellectual and be part of a messianic movement. Messiahs don’t entertain doubts. I suspect Rowley felt the change under way; if it didn’t bother others about themselves, it bothered him about himself.4
For we also know that once the Koch people settled in—and then took over—at George Mason University, concern turned into contempt, then disgust, until Rowley came to viscerally despise the team of operatives and their academic enablers who were now, as far as Rowley was concerned, occupying his campus. He called Richie Fink, Charles Koch’s top strategist, “a third-rate political hack” and “a man who is very appropriately named.”5
Rowley said what others never dared to admit: “Far too many libertarians have been seduced by Koch money into providing intellectual ammunition for an autocratic businessman.” It had reached the point, he came to believe by 2012, that there was no hope that any of those who participated in the “free market think tanks” would “speak out.” He was blunt about the reason why: “Too many of them benefit financially from the pocket money doled out by Charles and David Koch.”6
Did Rowley include Buchanan, as well, in this suggestion of so many having been bought? While Buchanan no longer came to campus after 1998 to teach strategy to a new generation of operatives with the alacrity he once showed, nor did he play any other ongoing direct role that I have been able to trace in what had now become Koch’s movement, he continued to accept the honors and emoluments that Koch’s people made sure to send his way. In his memoirs, published ten years later, he went out of his way to say that, looking back over his lifetime’s work, “I have no regrets.”7
Perhaps. But Buchanan was far too smart not to remember the young man who had once promised UVA president Colgate Darden that he would seek to defeat Keynesian economics and liberal politics by winning the war of ideas against the other side—not by writing training manuals for subversion by stealth. Had he withdrawn after the Wendy Gramm episode so that he would not have to personally witness what his decades of work had wrought? Again, we don’t know.
Rowley clearly continued to respect Buchanan, but perhaps not so blindly, for he predicted, as the 2012 election approached, that the libertarian cause they shared “may well suffer,” at least in principle, “serious harm” for having become the instrument of a tyrant. Watching how Koch commandeered the Cato Institute for his “crude” plan to speed up the libertarian conquest of America by using the very governmental apparatus that libertarians had long criticized made him angry. He saw, too, that Koch had “no scruples concerning the manipulation of scholarship”; he wanted Cato’s output to aid his cause, period. When a few veteran libertarian board members and staff raised questions, he replaced them with his own people, who now included the kind of “social conservatives” and political party figures who were once anathema to libertarians. In the end, though, Rowley’s loyalty was to the cause, not to his adopted country. (He was born and educated in England.) He was concerned about Cato, not America, and certainly not the fate of majority rule. Neither he nor any other insider ever went public with their concerns. Nor did anyone else sound the alarm for the rest of us about what Koch’s “proxy army,” as one Rowley reader called it, was doing to the country.8
Intrepid investigative journalists had by then reported on many of the maneuvers of that proxy army. They revealed how it was operating on more fronts through more ostensibly separate organizations than ordinary mortals could easily follow. It was occupying the Republican Party, using the threat of well-funded primary challenges to force its elected officials to do the cause’s bidding or lose their seats. It was pushing out radical right laws ready to bring to the floor in every state through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It was selling those laws through the seemingly independent but centrally funded and operationally linked groups of the State Policy Network. It was leveraging the anger of local Tea Party groups to move the legislative agenda of Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. Its state affiliates were energizing voter turnout with deceitful direct mail campaigns. Its elected allies were shutting down the federal government; in effect, using its employees and the millions who rely on it as hostages to get what they otherwise could not—and much, much more.9
In the shock-and-awe-style coordinated push to implement radical change in record time, without customary transparency or deliberative process, is it any wonder that no one noticed how many of the leading operatives in this vast project had been trained in economics at Virginia institutions, especially at Buchanan’s last home, George Mason University? No. Nor is it any wonder that in the scramble to keep up with all the action, no one inquired about the source of the ideas that made these efforts cohere or identified their endgame. Surely, this was just partisan hardball played with astonishing new viciousness.
The acclaimed jurist Louis Brandeis, who over the course of his lifetime amassed considerable wealth, once warned the American people that as a nation, “we must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” I suspect, however, that even Brandeis (who also spoke of the need for unions, and for social justice and wise regulation in an earlier age when capital ran amok) never imagined that enough wealth could be concentrated in the hands of a few to launch such an audacious stealth attack on the foundational notion of government being of, by, and for the people.10
But Brandeis also bequeathed us the maxim “Sunlight
is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In that spirit of bringing secrets from the shadows out into the open light of day, where they can be examined by all those they affect, I will use this conclusion to convey what is in store if we do not take this assault on our governance and our way of life seriously and respond effectively to it. For all its horror, this portrait can be painted in good part with the words of the people who seek to create it.
• • •
“If you tell a great lie and repeat it often enough, the people will eventually come to believe it,” Joseph Goebbels, a particularly ruthless, yet shrewd, propagandist, is said to have remarked. Today the big lie of the Koch-sponsored radical right is that society can be split between makers and takers, justifying on the part of the makers a Manichaean struggle to disarm and defeat those who would take from them. Attend a Tea Party gathering and you will hear endless cries about the “moocher class.”11 Read the output of the libertarian writers subsidized by wealthy donors and you will encounter endless variations. David Boaz of the Cato Institute, to choose just one, speaks of the “parasite economy” that divides us into “the predators and the prey.”12 Addressing an audience of $50,000-per-plate donors, Mitt Romney famously remarked that “47 percent” of voters were, in effect, leeches on “productive” Americans.13
Is there any evidence to suggest that close to half of American society is intent on exploiting the rich through the tax system? That they contribute nothing, while using government to gang up on a defenseless minority that somehow, all on its own, generates wealth? Is it true that the wealthiest among us are being unfairly fleeced by government? If so, how do we square that with what is now common knowledge: that the secretary to a billionaire will often pay a higher tax rate than her boss?
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