Marie Gryphon

The Cato Institute’s co-founder and president, Ed Crane, describes the libertarian think tank as an “idea factory”–an organization of scholars who generate and disseminate important new public policy ideas. Because original ideas require independent thinking, Charles and David Koch’s recent lawsuit against the Institute may cripple its productive capacity. The Kochs have asked the court to order the widow of former Institute chairman William Niskanen to surrender his shares in the non-profit. If they succeed, the Kochs will control the Cato Institute outright, empowered to dismiss fellow board members and sack Mr. Crane, under whose presidency the think tank has flourished for 35 years.

The Koch brothers’ vision for the Cato Institute’s future would destroy much of its value. Slate’s Dave Weigel reports that following Mr. Niskanen’s death, David Koch and a handful of Koch executives met with Chairman Robert Levy to propose changes at Cato. “They said that a principal goal was to defeat Barack Obama,” Mr. Levy told Slate. “The way David [Koch] put it was, ‘We would like you to provide intellectual ammunition that we can then use at Americans for Prosperity and our allied organizations.’” Mr. Levy asked whether Cato didn’t already generate “intellectual ammunition,” but he “never got a satisfactory answer. The only answer that makes sense was that Cato needed to be more responsive to their needs. We would take closer marching orders. That’s totally contrary to what we perceive the function of Cato to be.”

The Kochs’ actions support Mr. Levy’s interpretation of their words. They recently invoked the Cato Institute’s dormant-for-decades shareholder agreement to pack its board of directors with Koch industry executives and allies, including Republican Party activists who do not have libertarian views. Two of these, Virginia GOP vice-chair Kevin Gentry and former McCain spokesperson Nancy Pfotenauer, have reportedly complained that Cato “wasn’t doing enough to defeat President Obama in November and that we weren’t working closely enough with grass roots activists.”

At best, the Kochs and their cohort don’t fully understand how to create working environments that foster good scholarship. But an off-hand word choice in Charles Koch’s March 8^th statement is consistent with a more troubling possibility: that they don’t view Cato as a scholarly organization at all. “With its emphasis on education, Cato has contributed greatly to the marketplace of ideas and is now a respected thought leader,” Mr. Koch writes. If the think tank merely “educated” Congress about things that Mr. Koch already knows, his plans might do less harm. But the Cato Institute produces new research. As the Century Foundation’s Janice Nittoli warns, Mr. Koch’s plans would pressure its scholars to abandon the rigorous research practices that yield genuinely original ideas.

All research builds on basic premises, and the Cato Institute’s scholars are united by certain shared premises: that economic freedom is essential to human freedom, that big government schemes (in either domestic or foreign policy) are intrinsically hobbled by information problems and subject to corruption by special interests, and that state power grows unless liberty is vigilantly guarded. But premises are not results. The results of public policy research–the ideas that Cato’s scholars produce–are based not only on their shared premises, but also on rigorous analysis. Think tank scholars create new models of existing bureaucratic or economic systems, they evaluate the costs and benefits of existing policies, and they craft new policy proposals. All of these tasks can be done well or poorly by standards that are independent of anyone’s electoral agenda, and doing them well is what good scholarship is all about.

Independence does not require isolation. When scholars and activists voluntarily meet to exchange views, the quality of public policy research is not thereby harmed and may sometimes improve. For example, the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation fosters dialogue among what the Kochs call “allied organizations” by forming issue-specific working groups, to which they invite think tank scholars, grass roots activists, industry trade group representatives, and congressional committee staffers. Think tankers love to explain their research to anyone who will listen, and they benefit from constructive criticism as long as they are not pressured to tailor their findings to activists’ agendas. If anything, Cato’s scholars would benefit from similar engagement with colleagues and activists on other parts of the political spectrum.

But if the Kochs control the Cato Institute–if they can sack Board members and officers, and therefore scholars, at will–then Koch-facilitated engagement with their “allied” political activists will be neither voluntary nor independent for Cato’s scholars, who will inevitably face pressure to generate research findings that are, as David Koch’s comments suggested to Mr. Levy, “more responsive to their needs.” Whether or not the Koch brothers intend to undermine the quality of scholarship at the Cato Institute, their plans will accomplish just that.

The Cato Institute’s commitment to non-partisanship fosters scholarly integrity. For example, senior fellows Peter Van Doren and Jerry Taylor recently published an article in U.S. News & World Report titled, “It’s Not Obama’s Fault That Crude Oil Prices Have Increased.” This is a textbook example of independent scholarship: Van Doren and Taylor analyzed the crude oil market and concluded that a change in marginal supply from the North Sea–not Obama’s energy policy–had triggered the pain at the pump. In a Koch-controlled Cato Institute, for which “a principle goal was to defeat Barack Obama,” such an article would be contrary to the Institute’s declared mission.

If activist groups like Americans for Prosperity choose to promote the Cato Institute’s ideas, so much the better. But activists cannot simply order up what they want from any think tank worthy of the name. While new insights require rigorous scholarship, a mandate to produce talking points in support of someone else’s agenda would actually preclude it.

The Cato Institute is not a public relations shop. To ensure that it does not become one, the Institute’s shareholders should reorganize the non-profit along more conventional lines, with a self-perpetuating board of directors. This would not be a functional change. The Cato Institute was run this way for 27 years. Between 1981 and 2008, during which time the think tank swept to prominence, its shareholders did not meet even once.

The legal issues raised by the Kochs’ lawsuit are complex. The Koch brothers may or may not be entitled to pursue their plans under Kansas law. But those who value the Cato Institute’s unique contribution to the public policy debate should encourage the Koch brothers to change course before they devalue an institution in which they and others have invested so much.

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