Hey Paul Krugman, You Should Read DiLorenzo on the Cato Suppression Machine

Paul Krugman writes today at NYT:

David Glasner has an interesting post about how the Cato Institute suppressed an old paper of his, refusing either to publish it or release it for publication elsewhere, not for a few months, but for decades. What Glasner may not know or recall is that Cato has a long-standing habit of trying to send inconvenient history down the memory hole, in ways that — I’m sorry to say — are more consequential than the suppression of his thoughts on fiat money.

You see, back in the 1990s Cato had a long-standing project titled the Project on Social Security Privatization. Then they discovered that the term polled badly, and renamed it The Project on Social Security Choice. OK. But they also tried to pretend that they hadnever used the term privatization, which was clearly a liberal smear — and they went so far as to edit old web pages and records of old conferences to eliminate the term “privatization”, as if it had never been used. This was, by the way, in concert with the Bush administration, which was similarly trying to bully reporters into abandoning the term (with a fair bit of success).

I still sometimes run into people suggesting that Cato is a relatively honest if misguided operation, unlike the obvious hackery of Heritage. But it ain’t so, and never was.

It's much worse than that. Tom DiLorenzo also experienced the Cato suppression machine. SEE: My Experiences at the Cato Institute by Thomas DiLorenzo.

Then there is the Murray Rothbard-Cato split, which involved Charles Koch refusing to give Murray his Cato stock certificate. SEE: Understanding the Rothbard-Koch Break

 -RW