Public Choice Links, 5/24/2026

Michael Lind on billionaires funding NGOs; Allison Schrager on people hating billionaires; Bill Galston on a multi-party configuration; Frannie Block on the evil teachers' unions

Michael Lind writes,

NGOs involved in politics are donor-funded “astroturf” organizations — fake grassroots outfits. To name one example, Third Act is fiscally sponsored by the Sustainable Markets Foundation, which, in turn, has received grants and donations in the last few years from the center-left Ford Foundation, the Tides Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Sequoia Climate Foundation, and the Aspen Community Foundation — a roll call of nonprofit foundations endowed by billionaires and millionaires. For NGOs like these to denounce the existence of billionaires as a public-policy failure and a flaw in contemporary capitalism is thus to bite the hands that feed them.

This kind of nonprofit advocacy by donor-funded astroturf groups by its nature is inimical to democracy, which depends upon debate among those who hold different views and compromise among groups with different interests. The technocratic strain of progressivism, which goes back more than a century in the United States, is particularly suspicious of legislatures in which debates and compromises take place.

I am convinced that NGOs are worse than profit-seeking businesses. Profit-seeking businesses serve customers. Non-profits serve rich donors. Lind sees non-profits as worse than the democratic process. He takes a more romantic view of democracy than I would, but he could be correct about the relative merits.

Allison Schrager writes,

But a wealth tax is not the answer to power concentration either. It does not break up power; it just transfers it to Ro Khanna. It makes the government more powerful and less accountable—at least Elon Musk has to answer to shareholders. Give me one example of a government that appropriated wealth to disempower its citizens and it ended well.

The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced also makes the argument that concentration of political power is more severe than concentration of wealth.

Bill Galston writes,

Last year, a respected survey research firm X-rayed the electorate and found five potential parties lurking beneath the skin of our politics—MAGA supporters, traditional conservatives, the moderate left, socialists and a market-oriented, socially liberal party of the center.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But Britain has shown us that a first-past-the-post electoral system doesn’t impose an insuperable barrier to the emergence of a multiparty system.

The “market-oriented, socially liberal party of the center” sounds like libertarians. In other words, a pipe dream.

Where is the median voter theorem in all of this? The median voter on the left is probably moderate, and the median voter on the right is probably MAGA, which is the inverse of libertarian. So in the long run the Democrats could be moderate and the Republicans could throw the libertarians and libertarian-leaning conservatives under the bus.

But through 2028, I expect that the moderate left Democrats will be under-bussed. The far left has too much energy and is too doctrinaire for any other outcome in the short term.

Frannie Block writes,

During this most recent fiscal year, the NEA reported $51.7 million in political activities and lobbying, in addition to $123.3 million in contributions, gifts, and grants. Many of the disbursements in the latter category were classified as “general contributions” in financial disclosures, according to the report. But digging deeper, some of these funds were going to explicitly political organizations, like the State Engagement Fund, a nonprofit widely recognized for funding left-wing political causes without revealing its donors.

Friends scoff at me for constantly complaining about the political power of the teachers’ unions. But it is a vicious cycle: the more evil they become, the more powerful they become, and the more evil they become.

substacks referenced above:

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How Teachers’ Unions Became Political Big Spenders

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Rich and frothy