No one was surprised when the Harvard Business School published a short profile on Grover Norquist (MBA '81) in the June 2005 issue of its official alumni magazine, the HBS Alumni Bulletin. The Bulletin's "One on One" feature has interviewed a wide range of graduates in past issues.
And after all, our CEO-in-Chief, President Bush, also hailed from "the West Point of Capitalism."
In the September issue, other HBS alums responded to the Norquist piece in their Letters to the Editor. The shocking verdict: an astonishing, nearly unanimous wave of revulsion about Norquist, his worldview and his impact.
Comparisons to Hitler, endorsements of inheritance taxes, concerns about increasing concentration of wealth, unvarnished blasts against Cheney and the war... You might think it was the Worker's World Daily, not an HBS publication.
Read these stinging rebukes after the jump.
In the June column, Norquist was positively portrayed, starting with the up-front teaser:
As Washington's most influential "unknown" insider, anti-tax activist Grover Norquist (MBA '81) is the architect of a far-reaching agenda aimed at reshaping American society.
The interview's introduction reviewed how, as President and co-founder of Americans for Tax Reform...
... Norquist has aggressively championed an anti-tax philosophy that has become a central tenet of the Republican Party. His Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a promise never to raise taxes, has been signed by President George W. Bush (MBA '75) and most Republican members of Congress. But his influence extends beyond tax issues. Since 1993, Norquist has hosted in his D.C. office a weekly strategy session with conservative activists, a standing-room only gathering that now numbers 120 attendees. Across the country, he has established similar weekly meetings in 47 states, each aimed at rallying conservatives at the grassroots level.
Over the years, Norquist, 48, has raised more than a few eyebrows with his provocative rhetoric. A master of hyperbole, he once declared that he wanted to "reduce [government] to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub." Rhetorical flourishes aside, his stock in Washington has never been higher. As a confidant of presidential adviser Karl Rove, a friend since their college days, Norquist has direct access to the White House and served as an architect of the President's first-term tax cuts. His ultimate goal: a permanent Republican majority that will oversee cutting government spending by half over the next 25 years.
In the interview, Norquist outlined his tax reform priorities for the second Bush administration:
Year one, kill the "death" [estate] tax. Year two, replace IRA accounts with an expanded system of Retirement Savings Accounts, making RSAs available to all Americans and the contribution level as high as possible. That would begin the process of ending the double taxation of savings and investment. Year three, go to first-year expensing for business investment so that when a company buys a new computer or a piece of equipment, it doesn't depreciate it over a number of years. Year four, extend all tax cuts scheduled to expire in the next ten years.
When questioned about the impact of further tax cuts on the deficit, he threw in this zinger:
The deficit is an uninteresting and unimportant number that is the difference between two very interesting and very important numbers: how much money the government spends and how much it collects in taxes. Those are both important numbers. The difference between the two of them is not important...
Finally, Norquist offered a prediction about how the country's coming embrace of the GOP will ensure radical reform of Social Security. HBS: "Will President Bush win on this?" Norquist:
I think it will be difficult. But it will happen in the next seven years. Republicans will pick up Senate seats in the 2006 elections and again in the 2008 elections, giving them at least sixty votes. So we may get it in 2009, or we may have to go through one more election cycle.
[Read the entire interview (or don't) at the HBS Bulletin site:]
http://www.alumni.hbs.edu/bulletin/2005/june/oneonone.html
Fast-forward to the September issue, front of the book, Letters to the Editor.
There are ten published letters from other HBS alumni, and every one is a reaction to the Norquist piece. And of the ten, I count one qualified support for Social Security reform (with disclaimers about the rest of the Norquist doctrine), and nine body slams against Norquist.
Let's take a look at what HBS alums can do with their education, experience and "rhetorical flourishes" when directed against the forces of darkness.
John Sweeney (MBA '69) opens the salvo with:
The contrast between the two 1981 MBA graduates profiled in the June issue could not be more profound. [One] is working with UNICEF in Sudan to alleviate the suffering of impoverished Sudanese children. Grover Norquist is working with the Republican Party in the US to eliminate government expenditures on health care, education and Social Security... To continue on the past espoused by Norquist and his cohorts is to sow the seeds of destruction of democracy. It is creating an American aristocracy callous to the human condition. We cannot expect to foster democracy in Iraq and other places abroad if we do not set an example of democracy's compassion for all its citizens here in the United States.
Michael Hogan (MBA '88) joins in with:
[Your feature] gives us all a chance to reflect on the disingenuousness and selfish agenda that drives Mr. Norquist and his ilk. Aside from such self-evidently ridiculous statements as, "You rein in the cost of government in two ways. First, stop spending so much. Second, reduce the cost of government...," he would have us believe that we labor under an unreasonable tax burden and are the victims of a bloated, inefficient economy dominated by the public sector.
Hogan saves his strongest blow for his conclusion:
In fact, we are the victims of an administration promoted by Mr. Norquist that pursues a set of foreign and domestic policies with an implicit taxpayer burden of historic proportions, but which he would have someone else, that is, our children and grandchildren, pay for. That's what passes for "family values" according to Mr. Norquist and his cronies. It's high time we call a spade a spade - Mr. Norquist wants a first-class physical and economic infrastructure, the military to support a sole superpower status, and someone else to pay for it. My HBS expected a higher standard of intellectual honesty and rigor.
Fran Henry (MBA '82) reminds us what we've lost to self-imposed tax-starvation:
[Norquist and the ATR] paint a chilling picture of our future society...Middle-class children no longer have what I had as a child: small classes, and arts and music programs. If his work continues to succeed, more resources will be concentrated in the already-wealthy population. The shared community value of helping disadvantaged people will be debunked.
John Cook (MBA '68) reflects on Norquist's infamous "bathtub" aphorism and runs down (in great detail) how "the government has played a major role in the most important advances that our country has made," including:
- writing our Constitution
- purchasing the Louisiana Territory and providing land to citizens
- funding the transcontinental railroad
- building the interstate highway system
- funding land-grant colleges
- funding a GI Bill to educate a generation of Americans
- funding ARPANET, precursor to the Internet
He continues by deftly tweaking the party of Lincoln on the forgotten (to them) issue of race and economic injustice:
Finally, had the government followed through on Lincoln's plan to give each slave forty acres and a mule, it would have given our African-American citizens a basis for economic growth and integrated them into our society. Not doing so is a mistake that we still live with as many African-Americans continue to suffer from a lack of financial equality.
He closes with a drive-by mugging of the Veep:
It's high time that people like Norquist and Dick Cheney (who said in the vice presidential debate that his accumulation of wealth was no thanks to the government) think harder about history and the critical role government has played in the success of the country and of our citizens. It is unconscionable for them to regularly trash government. How successful would either of these guys have been if they had been born as peasants in some Third World country?
Uwe Lembke (MBA '61) lobs this one from France:
The opinions expressed by Grover Norquist and especially the way they are presented remind me of the writings of a late politician who suggested that the intellectual content of propaganda must be targeted at the lowest common denominator of the population in terms of intelligence. In other words, the subtlety of the message declines in direct proportion to the number of people the slogan is attempting to reach. "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous." In case you're wondering, that quote is from Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf."
Vernon Brown (MBA '74) jams on a slightly different Nazi riff:
...[Norquist] is a person who [in a recent interview] compared some laws passed by the Congress of the United States and signed by the President to Nazi Germany atrocities. I think you might do another piece on how well the Iraq war is going after the elections there.
Other letter writers manage to work in the following zingers:
Apart from what many consider his twisted and socially dangerous views on the role of taxation, he is also known for the company he keeps. That company appears to be rather insalubrious, if he did indeed work with Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff to arrange for small group meetings between various Indian tribal leaders and President Bush - for a price, of course
We are awash in a sea of political rant, unsupported by logic or fact...Still we need to hear from Grover Norquist in our alumni magazine? What the hell's the matter with you people?
Norquist should heed the dictum of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "Taxes are what we pay for a civilized society." A civilized society, moreover, not only provides necessities and amenities for all but it also provides a "safety net" for the less fortunate... A crucial question is what should be taxed. Should it be only income and consumption? Why not wealth, including inherited wealth?
Remember, these love songs to government are from Harvard MBAs!
Not only is President Bush a bad example of American ideals and talent, but also a bad example of the skill, perspective and public-mindedness that often comes out of his MBA alma mater, the Harvard Business School.