The recent acquisition of Heartland documents (apparently along with a fraudulent “strategy” document) has created a minor journalist firestorm. I’ll comment on the particulars of this incident but the broader implication is but one battle in the war to drive the market from the marketplace of ideas. More on this but first let me summarize the facts as they now appear.
Peter Gleick, a climate scientist, claimed to be a board member and thus requested that Heartland re-forward him the materials sent out for a forthcoming Board meeting. The staffer did so and Mr. Gleick then emailed “the” documents to interested parties, and they were originally posted on DeSmogBlog. I put the in quotes because it now appears that amongst the purloined documents was also enclosed a “strategy” document that outlined ideas to advance a more balanced understanding of the global warming policy area. Serious doubts about the authenticity of this strategy document have since been raised. Not surprisingly, the global warming alarmists view this entire imbroglio as “proof” that skeptics are “only doing it for the money!” I wonder whether they’ve ever done a comparison of salaries in right-of-center and left-of-center NGOs?
Ignored in all this is, however, a larger and even more serious issue – the growing effort to drive the market (and market-friendly voices) from the marketplace of ideas. The left has found that their statist alliances – trial lawyers and environmentalists, unionists and consumer groups – have been powerful in advancing their agenda. They’re not eager to see economic liberals do the same.
Note their systematic ideological-cleansing program: no one with any business links serving on a government policy advisory group; no one with a business background to serving in government; pejorative labeling in academic journals of any business funded research; banning academics funding by business; passing stockholder resolutions against companies assisting pro-market policy allies; providing financial aid to our groups or of even interacting cooperatively with us (e.g. the Heartland crime).
If these efforts succeed, then the only legitimate voices in the policy debates will be crony capitalists and statist intellectuals. A serious threat and one that the Heartland incident should alert us to.
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Fred
We are well into the fourth decade of the anti-industrial revolution (as described by Rand in the 60s). Aside from the useful idiots of the rent seeking corporate world, why would these church police of the watermelon theocracy want anything to do with businessmen. The cultural and institutional left, comprising academia, education, entertainment, mainstream media, unions, public employees, and the nurtured, bribed and growing underclass (default outcome of an economy in regulatory stasis since the nineties) are all that are needed in accomplishing their dystopian wreckage. The current situation in America and the West in general isn’t simply a product of the 2008 election, despite Obama’s excellent personification of the rot. We are in a civil war with one side practising and expecting civil behavior while the other side is more intent on winning.
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