Yesterday, the American Legislative Exchange Council, facing corporate-contributor defections, announced it was disbanding its non-economic task force. See, ALEC sharpens focus on jobs, free markets, and growth, announces the end of the task force that dealt with non-economic issues.
All this came about from complaints from progressives that led corporations to balk, but the change is good for libertarians. In fact, better for us than anyone.
(It’s silly that the Wall Street Journal thinks this is a retreat from free-market principles: ALEC’s own press release concedes they’d gone into topics far removed from market-based solutions.)
Libertarians benefit from an ALEC that’s free-market and non-partisan. What went wrong at ALEC is the Kochization of libertarianism: insisting that libertarian ideas are no different from conservative or Republican ones (or that libertarianism should be subordinated to the GOP in a struggle against Pres. Obama and progressives).
The Kochs’ approach – with Americans for Prosperity, with ALEC, and against an independent Cato Institute, represents one of the two existential threats to libertarianism.
ALEC will be a better organization with a clearer, more honest commitment to market-based ideas.
No one should be happier about that than libertarians.
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