Reply #10: Oh, I think the answer to that is: "chicken" [View All]

[skids]

Heritage is the biggest free-market think tank\u2014in fact the biggest think tank period\u2014in Washington. It has a budget of $25 million and provides "talking points" to conservative Congressmen who don't have time to do their own research. Heritage is a kind of "grey eminence" behind Congress, and very actively helps direct U.S. politics.

And what a bunch of radicals these folks are! Like the rare ultra-anarchist, they basically want to "smash the state"\u2014but unlike such anarchists, they're rich, not so rare, and succeeding.

Heritage is very up-front about these goals. Paul Krugman and others have pointed out that the goal of the Bush administration seems to be to bankrupt the federal government; the Heritage Foundation indeed announces this vision up front: "Too many conservatives lose hope," writes Heritage president Edwin J. Feulner. "They doubt that the liberal welfare state can be brought to collapse.... In short, they doubt that The Heritage Foundation's Vision for America can be achieved." (By "liberal welfare state" he means Social Security, the Department of Education, and so on\u2014but not the Department of Defense. Read on.)

http://theyesmen.org/hijinks/bush/heritage.shtml