One of the wonderful things about book club blogging is that when a reviewer either hasn’t read the book carefully (or at all), misinterprets what it says, or leaves out pertinent details that undercuts his critique, the author gets to correct the record fairly efficiently. So, in response to Mr. Niskanen’s rebuttal, readers might be interested to know:

• Among the ideas that the Bush administration pursued that have been pushed by many of the right’s think tanks: stacking federal agencies with conservative political appointees in order to weaken the clout of career civil servants; broadening executive power based on a dubious theory massaged over the years in Federalist Society salons; the Bill Kristol-Robert Kagan-Paul Wolfowitz-Project for the New American Century strategy of “benevolent hegemony;” tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts; undercutting the regulatory system to an unprecedented degree; health savings accounts; and Social Security privatization. It’s true that federal spending didn’t decline the way Cato might have hoped. But the Bush administration was nonetheless extremely effective at emasculating much of the federal government’s domestic capabilities in conformance with the right’s ideology.


• I never wrote that conservative policy institutes serve as refuges for those who could not earn academic appointments. A lot of those people are indeed capable enough to work in universities, and many have. While I believe that the majority of “scholars” in the right’s leading think tanks are driven more by ideology than an inclination to follow where the facts lead, nowhere in my book do I make any generalizations about the motivations or abilities of conservatives.


• Chapter six of my book provides all kinds of detail demonstrating how public health, safety, and environmental protections have been undercut by the Bush administration. The idea of White House oversight of the regulatory process isn’t what’s new, as the book explains; rather, under the leadership of conservative hero John Graham, all kinds of new barriers were erected to impede the writing and implementation of regulations. Just about anyone who pays attention to this stuff agrees that the Bush administration has gone far beyond what any of his Republican predecessors did in attempting to weaken the regulatory system. If the president’s poll numbers were higher, that feat alone would have made him a hero to the right.


• As for the chapter on school vouchers, my book fully explains how Milwaukee greatly expanded its experiment beginning in 1998. Mr. Niskanen didn’t mention, though, that the state decided against keeping track of test scores for voucher students at that point, making it impossible to discern its impact with precision (though an in-depth Milwaukee Journal Sentinel investigation in 2005 raised serious questions about the program’s effectiveness.) And the two Harvard professors Mr. Niskanen is alluding to, Paul Peterson and Caroline Hoxby, have in the past received considerable support from the right-wing Olin Foundation, and produce studies that almost invariably show that voucher programs work. But other studies almost invariably succeed in debunking their voucher (and charter school) reports. (There’s plenty about that in the book too).