TIMOTHY NOAH MAY 23, 2012
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The American Enterprise Institute has spent the past couple of decades gradually shedding a once-decent reputation for think-tank scholarship--a worthy conservative counterpoint to (and occasional collaborator with) the Brookings Institution--and acquiring a new reputation as a slick assembly line for partisan agitprop. It began under AEI President Christopher DeMuth, whom I once labelled a "hack extraordinaire." But AEI's current president, Arthur C. Brooks, makes DeMuth look like a monk. An avid culture warrior, Brooks in 2010 published a book with the hilariously apocalyptic title The Battle: How The Fight Between Free Enterprise And Big Government Will Shape America's Future. The marketing for his new book, The Road To Freedom: How To Win The Fight For Free Enterprise, includes a video that looks and sounds so uncannily like a political ad that I concluded Brooks doesn't want us to read it or buy it. He wants us to vote for it!
4 comments
The crowd attending the spring AEI meeting always has the largest jets. Very large jets. It seems wasteful for a couple of dandies to fly around in such large jets. Maybe they carry large packages.
- rayward
May 23, 2012 at 8:34pm
Finally someone who stands proud for the best kind of greed: unfettered. After watching the video, sign me up for whatever "invert the current tax brakets/drill for oil in Lincoln's head on Mt. Rushmore/eat the poor" campaign Arthur Brooks currently espouses. You know. Freedom, baby!
- SEBASTIANSALING@HOTMAIL.COM
May 23, 2012 at 8:45pm
AEI, meet Heritage.
- liberalref
May 23, 2012 at 10:15pm
Now what's the difference between AEI/Heritage and the trolls they pay to go on internet comment boards?
- Pnaut
May 24, 2012 at 12:54pm