Much is made of how the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute are funded by the Koch Brothers to act as their propagandists. Greenpeace and Right Wing was good enough to follow the money:
- American Enterprise Institute: $350,000 in total between 2004 and 2011 as compared to an annual income of $25 million.
- Cato Institute $ 5.35 million over 14 years. Their last annual donation in excess of $250,000 was in 2001. Its annual income is $12 million.
Chickenfeed – on an annual basis, this financial largess would barely pay for a cheap research assistant in a small office out of the Cato’s 90 staff members and 60-adjunct scholars. An average congressman raises more than this in political donations each year. Romney and Obama each spent $1 billion on their presidential campaigns.
Karl Popper argued that who made an argument is of little value. What matters is critical discussion of what they said. Knowledge grows through critical discussion.
Peter Drucker made similar points about people with great strengths also come with great flaws. (Biography sales would be 1/10th of its size if the great were not flawed).
Drucker championed a business rule of never making a decision until there is disagreement; only then do you know the boundary of what you plan to do. Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind. This above all, explains why effective decision-makers deliberately disregard the second major command of the textbooks on decision-making and create dissension and disagreement, rather than consensus.
Decisions of the kind the executive has to make are not made well by acclamation. They are made well only if based on the clash of conflicting views, the dialogue between different points of view, the choice between different judgments. The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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