Tax-Funded Politics

"If awards were given for informed bravery, James Bennett would be on the short list for one. His Tax-Funded Politics exposes the greed and political corruption running rampant in the most sacred of America's sacred cows. His eye-opening chapter on "Heart, Lungs, and the Big C" is worth the price of the book by itself. I cannot think of a better cure for gullibility than Tax-Funded Politics." --Dwight Lee, Ramsey Professor of Economics, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia "Government spending almost always is a waste of money, but it adds insult to injury when our tax dollars are given to organizations that lobby for even bigger government. If Professor Bennett's book, [Tax-Funded Politics] doesn't get your blood boiling, nothing will." --Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D., President, The Heritage Foundation "The founding fathers hoped that the Constitution would control "the violence of faction," by which they meant special-interest politics. But government has not only failed to restrain the plundering of taxpayers by special interests; it subsidizes it. In Tax-Funded Politics James T. Bennett exposes this illegal racket, chapter and verse. With meticulous documentation and a fiery writing style, Bennett shows how government fuels its own growth by subsidizing the statist side of every political debate, from abortion to zoning. And it is not just interest groups of the left that feed at the federal tax trough. With the ascendency of the Republicans in Washington has come tax-funded, big-government "neoconservativism." Read Tax-Funded Politics and find out what is really wrong with Washington." --Thomas J. DiLorenzo, Professor of Economics, Loyola College in Maryland and author of The Real Lincoln (Crown Forum, 2003) The past two decades have seen the growth of well-coordinated networks of political activists who have managed to obtain hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars for political lobbying. Although federal regulations prohibit such activities, loopholes in the law allow these monies to be masked as private resources. State and federal taxpayers, monies fund the lobbying efforts of private advocacy groups on both the political left and the right. In Tax-Funded Politics, James Bennett argues that governmental agencies, rather than combating theses abuses, aid and abet them in order to increase their own size and scope. Drawing on a broad range of examples, Bennett shows how the ideals of the nation's Founding Fathers have been subverted by molding and manipulating the will of the people through government-orchestrated propaganda. Government agencies, far from being indifferent to self-aggrandizement and the consolidation of wealth and power, are concerned with their own self-interest, whether it is enhancing their budget or supporting a particular political agenda. Likewise, nonprofit entities claim to operate solely in the "public interest" but also engage in political advocacy and lobbying activities. But when charities do the lobbying, blatant self-interest is wrapped in the halo of the "public interest." Tax-Funded Politics exposes dozens of mutually beneficial arrangements between government and charities involving hundreds of millions of dollars. It then explores their implications. Groups that receive government funds are loath to criticize failed government programs and are advocates for the expansion of the agencies that provide their support. Even charities learn not to bite the hand that feeds them. Although the vast majority of the funds are directed to nonprofit groups on the left of the political spectrum, so-called conservative organizations have also sought and received taxpayers' funds, despite promise to get government off our back and out of our pockets. James T. Bennett is professor of economics at George Mason University. He is founder and editor of the Journal of Labor Research