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Numerous right-wing think tanks infest America's landscape, generously funded by conservative foundations, including Koch Family Foundations (established by David, Charles and Claude R. Lambe), several Scaife ones, John M. Olin Foundation, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Smith Richardson Foundation, various others, and George Soros' Open Society Foundations, pretending to be liberal, when, in fact, he supports everything smelling money.
Their agenda includes marketplace sovereignty, deregulation, privatization of government services, ending popular entitlements, social spending, and affirmative action, prioritizing business friendly policies, waging class war, controlling electoral politics and supportive media backing everything on their wish list.
Among many others, their beneficiaries include the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Club for Growth, Federalist Society, Heritage Foundation, Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, best known for inaction while America sank into depression while he was president.
Its notorious members include Condoleezza Rice, George Shultz, Edwin Meese, Margaret Thatcher, William Perry, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, Michael Boskin, James Woolsey, Christopher Hitchens, Milton Friedman until he died, and Robert Barro - his Wall Street Journal op-ed attacking collective bargaining discussed below, typical of what Hoover members advocate.
Its mission statement endorses representative government, private enterprise, its definition of peace and personal freedom, and safeguarding America's system, benefitting wealth and power, not popular, interests.
Herbert Hoover's 1959 statement guides policy, saying:
America's "social and economic systems are based on private enterprise from which springs initiative and ingenuity....Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no governmental, social or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves. (Safeguarding) the American system, (based on) individual, economic, and political freedom; private enterprise; and representative government" is fundamental to bedrock Hoover principles, ones very much anti-labor.
So were Milton Friedman's. He said markets work best unfettered by rules, regulations, onerous taxes, trade barriers, "entrenched interests" and human interference, and the best government is practically none at all as anything it can do private business does better. Democracy and government of, by and for the people? Heresy for Friedman, an ideology he taught and endorsed.
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