The word on the street (K Street, that is) is that Charles Koch's lawsuit against the CATO Institute is motivated by his desire to abandon what he once believed was a potentially successful Grand Strategy and replace it with a different institutional strategy. The Grand Strategy was explained to me back in the early 1980s by Richard Fink, the longtime head of the Koch Foundation, when we were both young assistant professors of economics at George Mason University (and before Richie was with the Koch Foundation). The strategy was to use institutions such as George Mason to educate undergraduate and graduate students in free-market economics who would then work for various arms of the Kochtopus, for members of congress or the executive branch, or become journalists or elected officials themselves. In other words, the strategy was all about influencing or taking over the Washington Establishment.

Well, this strategy has had a 35-year run and is obviously a colossal failure. There has never been any single law or regulation that is known as the "CATO Rule," or the "CATO law to deregulate industry X," etc. The welfare/warfare state has exploded beyond the control of anyone over the past several administrations despite all those CATO conferences, all those rubber chicken lunches and dinners, and all of the juvenile sniping at and gossiping/lying about the Rothbardians associated with the Mises Institute and LewRockwell.com who have done nothing but pursue an alternative educational strategy.

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