Cato, Rand, Booze Allen Hamilton and a number of other think/research
tanks solely exist to provide the politicians with material to
reference in their speeches that happens to correlate with their
pre-orchestrated platforms. Just who do you believe is paying salaries
of these researchers.

Business does the same thing to dazzle their shareholders and
customers, except for the fact that the research firms that they engage
deal in a different field than politics. For example, The Gartner
Group and D.H. Brown firms supply the computer industry with reports
justifying and/or praising any of the product that a particular
computer manufacturer wishes to promote (and who happens to be funding
the research). Similarly, J.D. Power supplies research reports on
'customer satisfaction' whose results alway support the customer
satisfaction superiority of the company funding them at that moment.

I worked in the field for one year, and then couldn't stand it. The
firm was heavily funded by IBM, and when I once wrote a research report
praising the Silicon Graphics products over those of IBM on the basis
of price/performance, I found myself unemployed so I returned to the
world of real engineering work.

Getting back to Cato, their researchers and writers know who pays their
salary, and report accordingly. Having worked in a similar, but Wall
Street related environment, the analysts at Cato are not anxious to
halve their salaries and go back to working as the price of honestly
expressing what they actually believe, and I can't blame them for this.

I personally could not live with the hypocrisy of writing and promoting
ideas/products that I knew not to be true, or that I believed not to be
true, just for money.. Still, many people can.

Harry C.