Leading Policy Expert on the Rise of “Opinion for Hire”
INTERVIEW ON THE PRICE OF BUSINESS SHOW, MEDIA PARTNER OF THIS SITE.
Recently Kevin Price, Host of the nationally syndicated Price of Business Show, interviewed Phil Magness.
On a recent Price of Business, Host Kevin Price visited with Dr. Phil Magness of the Independent Institute.
The modern Washington think tank is ostensibly built to translate durable principles into rigorous public policy—though in practice, these institutions have long operated as advocacy shops with academic styling, closer to political instruments than disinterested research bodies. Still, the past decade has produced something more than routine drift: several of the most prominent conservative think tanks have executed a near-total reversal of their prior beliefs. Free-trade orthodoxy, fiscal restraint, robust global alliances, and strict limits on executive power—once treated as bedrock commitments—have been swapped almost wholesale for protectionist tariffs, expansive deficit spending, industrial policy, and an aggressive “postliberal” willingness to wield government power in service of cultural aims.
Several major institutions now read less like think tanks than weathervanes, its positions shifting in near-lockstep with whoever holds power and whoever’s writing checks. This dramatic realignment isdriven by donor retention and proximity to the White House. When institutional survival depends on political fealty, “research” becomes a marketing function.
The result is a policy landscape where it’s fair to ask whether “objectivity” was ever more than branding for institutions built, from the start, to serve an agenda.
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