The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train

from The Mises Institute: my piece on "The Washington Intellectual Gravy Train"  https://mises.org/library/washington-intellectual-gravy-train

Intellectuals have long been glorified as champions of truth and defenders of society’s highest values. But in Washington, they serve as Leviathan‘s Praetorian Guard. Intellectuals are thriving in DC thanks in large part to the ruinous policy advice they proffer...

Clifford May, the president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, commented in 2005: “It is the job of think tanks to create political capital. It is the job of politicians to spend it.” May’s think tank extols politicians who advocate bombing Muslim nations. Journalist Ken Silverstein, in an excellent report last year on think tank corruption, noted, “The Lexington Institute, a Virginia-based think tank, has never met a weapons program it didn’t like. That is not surprising since a good chunk of its funding — about $2.5 million in 2010 — comes from defense giants like Boeing, Lockheed and Northrop Grumman.”

Some think tanks offer little more than an intellectual version of “rent-a-mobs” of political protestors....

The more power politicians capture, the more profitable lying about government becomes. Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, in his famous 1944 essay in The Road to Serfdom, “Why the Worst Get on Top,” showed why, once government acquires vast power, “the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion.” In the same way, Washington is biased in favor of intellectuals who defend torture, total government surveillance, and the president’s assassination prerogative. The advocates and apologists for George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq continue to be esteemed inside the Beltway as foreign policy visionaries.

The closer that intellectuals get to politicians, the more weaselly they usually become.
https://mises.org/library/washington-intellectual-gravy-train