Heritage Celebrates 25 Years

The Power of Ideas: The Heritage Foundation at 25 Years

By Lee Edwards

Jameson Books, 1997

313 pages (24 photo pages)

$29.95

Ideas have consequences, said Richard Weaver famously, and, as the saying goes, truer words were never spoken.

Think. Ideas, good and bad, fire action. They spur history for the individual, organization, and nation-indeed, for civilization itself. They spell out life's endless story of thrust and parry, challenge and response, ideas and counter-ideas, mind over matter, matter over mind, action and reaction-as, again, civilization hangs in the balance. Where is the glory that was Greece, the splendor that was Egypt, the greatness that was Rome? Gone with the wind. In those cases, bad ideas won out in the end.

Here then is a book on good ideas put into consequences, translated into action, into the last 25 years of American political and economic history and the role played in it by the Heritage Foundation.

Heritage celebrates 1998 as its 25th year of expanding activity, with annual income over $32 million and rising, with individual contributors numbering 200,000 and rising, and a staff of 160 conservative thinkers and rising, with wide foundation support, with corporate supporters including Amway, Chase Manhattan, Coors, Dow Chemical, Fluor, General Motors, Loctite, Mobil, Pfizer, and Sears, with Lady Thatcher addressing a 25th anniversary dinner last December in Washington, D.C., before 1,700 diners.

Adjunct writer-historian Lee Edwards of Catholic University was commissioned by Heritage to review a quarter-century of the life of this major conservative Washington think tank. Heritage is ever thinking on tough problems facing the nation in what Heritage-a knowing analyst of human events and a consequential creator of ideas-ubs "the marketplace of ideas" (an apt expression on the battle for men's minds).

Some Heritage milestones:

* 1973-was incorporated and opened its doors, thanks to an idea and a $250,000 grant by Colorado brewer Joseph Coors. 1977-charged that the Carter Administration's energy plan would levy in effect a huge tax increase on the American people. 1978-made the case for indexing the tax code to protect Americans from inflation's inexorable "bracket creep." 1979-predicted, ahead of the CIA, global crude-oil shortages and gas lines.

* 1980-argued that "supply side" tax cuts would boost revenue if federal spending growth was held in check. 1981-published an ambitious 1,093-page Mandate for Leadership, a conservative policy guidebook for the incoming Reagan Administration and other organizations, a guidebook, now on a quadrennial election basis, covering every federal department and major program, with the book making the Washington Post best-seller list. 1982-published a monograph on welfare by then unknown Charles Murray, who later expanded the study into the landmark Losing Ground on the counterproductivity of the welfare state.

* 1995-issued the first annual Index of Economic Freedom of 101 countries, which since 1997 is co-published with the Wall Street Journal. 1997-examined the beginnings of Social Security privatization in Britain and Australia as possible working models for America.

Edwards relates the strategy underlying Heritage activity. Early on, two young think-tankers, Edwin J. Feulner, Jr., and Paul Weyrich, were struck by what they regarded as a seeming lack of timeliness in policy debate by other think tanks. They envisioned a think tank that would make a difference on policy, one that would come up with ideas and arguments before key decisions were made, especially on the Hill. Their game plan was to be something like that of Domino's Pizza-fast delivery of quality food for thought.

Quality. It cuts two ways. In the introduction, William F. Buckley, Jr., tells how the big Ford Foundation, with assets of around $10 billion today, led the late Henry Ford II to quit its board and publicly disavow its liberal quality, although the grandson of a pioneer of mass production was by bent, says Buckley, "a political accommodationist"

For his part, Heritage Foundation chief entrepreneur in ideas Ed Feulner (and, incidentally, the president of the prestigious international Mont Pelerin Society as well) says: "Freedom. Opportunity. Civil society. None of these ideas alone will roll back the liberal welfare state. Combined, they cannot fail. That is our vision of the future."

A fascinating vision, a fascinating book with a message: Ideas pack power with, very often, make-or-break consequences.

Dr. Peterson is distinguished Lundy professor emeritus of business philosophy at Campbell University in North Carolina

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. May 22, 1998
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved