It’s hardly a secret that King Rex Sinquefield’s Show-Me Institute is a conservative voice, with its drone of “free market,” anti-tax rhetoric.
No big deal. It’s a free country, and if Rex wants to hire a cadre of people to fight such evils as the minimum wage, income tax and—for that matter—virtually all corporate taxation, then he has every right to overstate that crusade as an “institute.”
But the Show-Me Institute also presents itself as a non-partisan, 501-C3 tax-exempt (fittingly) organization, so it’s generally careful to present itself as non-partisan. Just because its staff is populated with refugees from former Republican campaigns doesn’t make it Republican.
That said, it was interesting to see King Rex’s Show-Me co-founder, longtime Kansas City banking tycoon R. Crosby Kemper III, wax eloquent across the state in an op-ed piece railing against the proposed China hub project.
Set aside what one thinks about that issue. The commentary was most notable for how lifelong Republican Kemper, writing on behalf of Show-Me and above Show-Me’s tag line as an “independent think tank,” viewed the world.
Kemper proclaimed that “we as a state were making steady progress” toward renewing the free-enterprise system, until the China Hub idea ruined it all. Fine.
But the fun part is this: In citing the “real pluses” of Missouri’s progress toward his economic worldview, Kemper cited this tidbit of evidence:
“Missouri is home to a robust Tea Party movement.” (Emphasis added.)
Sounds like a slogan for the state license plate.
Given that it has become common knowledge that the Tea Party—love it or hate it—is mostly a wing of the Republican Party, it’s revealing that an independent think tank would see Missouri’s Tea Party infestation (my “independent” term) as a sign of de facto progress.
Lifelong Republican Kemper is certainly entitled to his admiration of the Tea Party, even writing as the head of his non-partisan not-for-profit, but it did make me wonder this: Does the Show-Me Institute officially proclaim its loyalty and support for this “robust movement”?
I searched “Tea Party” at showmeinstitute.org and found three unique references, two being presumably dispassionate analyses of issues involving Tea Party perspectives and a third leading into an article that “first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon” with the words “no, this will not be a Tea Party rant about how such...”
That’s where it stopped. So, curiosity aroused, I clicked on the article (which just happened to be headlined, not so dispassionately, “Health Care Reform Another Step in Decline of Our Economic Freedom”).
I’m always interested to read stuff that won’t be a Tea Party rant, so I was curious how they finished the sentence “this will not be a Tea Party rant about how such...”
Here’s how.
They decapitated the piece that had appeared in the Beacon over the byline of R.W. Hafer, a professor whose credits in the tag line referenced that he was a “research fellow at the Show-Me Institute.”
By decapitated, I mean they re-published the Beacon piece without its lead paragraph, which read:
“The passage and signing of the president's massive health care reform legislation are the latest chapters in the socialization of the economy. No, this is not going to be a 'tea party' rant about how such a change spells the doom of our culture as we know it. But there are growing signs that our leftward lurch to a world of a bigger, more activist government may not in our best long-term interests.”
Now the phrase “tea party rant” is hardly a fitting way to describe the expression of a robust movement helping to save the free-enterprise system. One can’t imagine Kemper having qualified his piece with such language.
But we’ll probably never know whether the Show-Me Institute simply made a technical error by omitting the lead paragraph of its own scholar’s published piece, or whether it just didn’t seem right to use that unpleasant phrase again.
So far, Kemper’s piece, published Tuesday in the Columbia Daily Tribune and today in the Post-Dispatch, hasn’t appeared at showmeinstitute.org. But if it does, I bet they won’t omit the part about the “robust” Tea Party being a “real plus” to Missouri.
SLM co-owner Ray Hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
Commentary by Ray Hartmann
