This is supposed to be an immediate medium, but this is a delayed posting. I’ve had all the pieces for over a week, but just not had them together in one place. In fact, I waited so long that some of what I’m about to tell you has been reported elsewhere. (And congrats to Tim Kelly for doing as a blogger should and jumping on it immediately, even if he did jump to a hasty conclusion or two.)
It’s been a while now, but do you remember the full-page ad with all the little piggies on it that ran on May 18? The text went like this:
Did your family budget grow by 13% this year?
State revenues did and some politicians in Columbia want to use it all to grow government.
Governor Sanford said “Enough is enough.”
Thank You Governor Sanford for standing up for the Taxpayers.
Check out our website to see whether your legislator votes with Governor Sanford to keep pork out of the budget.
www.scclubforgrowth.org
Paid for by the South Carolina Club for Growth
The ad kicked off a storm of speculation among South Carolina’s chattering classes. I wondered about it myself. I had never heard of the "South Carolina Club for Growth." I knew that the national Club for Growth was a huge fan of Gov. Sanford. But a Palmetto State connection was a new one on me. And knowing 
that a number of national groups have in recent years created South Carolina fronts to hide the fact that outsiders were trying to manipulate our politics, I was a little suspicious.
Others did more than wonder. E-mails were passed around and blot items were posted saying the ad was really a front for by this group or that individual, but while some of it was on the money, much was speculation.
Well, here’s the real story. The phone number on the web site on the ad (which for some reason I can’t access today; let me know if you have the same trouble), was the same number as for The Bastiat Society, an organization "formed to promote the virtue of commerce, and its role in making the world a better place." It was named for Frederic Bastiat, a 19th century French economist and writer.
The same phone number also belong to that organization’s president, who is none other than my good friend Ben Rast, the zen Catholic libertarian so well known locally for the financial advice he has long distributed on radio and television. I made a note to call Ben, but before I could, he had e-mailed me a press release telling me all about it. The release explained that "the South Carolina Chapter of the Club for Growth is dedicated to expanding the prosperity of working families through the Reagan Doctrine of lower taxes, smaller government and strong free enterprise."
But it didn’t explain where in the world the group suddenly came from, or what it had to do with other groups, individuals and entities within and without our state. So I e-mailed Ben to find out. He responded that
The Club is a registered political non-profit (a 501c4 and a PAC), and a state affiliate of the national Club for Growth. I filed all the paperwork over a year ago, and continue to file the public disclosures with the Ethics Commission. I’ve learned the governing class has made it very difficult for an interested citizen to get involved in politics outside of the major political parties.
I recruited a board, raised some money, and got involved in the general elections. I believe I sent you a press release announcing the Club’s formation.
I don’t recall that release, but if Ben says he sent it, I know he did. I doubt I would have taken much note of it at the time. Another libertarian group is born, ho-hum, I would have thought.
Anyway, I asked him who else was involved in this with him, and he said the group’s board was
currently composed of Thomas Ravenel (Charleston), Don McLaurin (Columbia and Georgetown), Griffin Cupstid (Spartanburg), and me. Dusty Rhodes, the publisher of The National Review and a resident of Hilton Head was on the board for most of last year, but he resigned because he didn’t have time.
The most active board members have been me, Ravenel, and McLaurin. Although we’ve been around for some time and we sent out press releases to let people know what we were doing, we clearly didn’t catch anyone’s attention…until now.
Anyway, on one of the several things Ben sent me (maybe it was the web site I can’t get to now) was a link for providing feedback. The link, it turns out, was labeled South Carolinians for Responsible Government — you know, the group that puts out all that misleading, and often insulting, propaganda about the "Put Parents in Charge" bill. Ben, if you’ll recall, wrote an op-ed piece for us a while back also supporting PPIC. I discovered this on the Saturday after the ad ran. OK, I’ve got to call Ben again. I did, and he called me back while I was shopping out on Harbison late that evening. (He had just gotten out of the new Star Wars movie, which he said was somewhat disappointing.)
It turns out that the connection is that Ben, or rather the S.C. Club for Growth, had hired Randy Page to help negotiate the regulations of political participation. (By way of explanation, he repeated his complaint about how politicos made it hard for ordinary people to get involved with politics outside of the major parties — something with which I empathize to some extent, despising parties as I do.) This was apparently some time before Mr. Page became affiliated with SCRG — something that happened after his predecessor was caught sending fake letters to The State.
The two groups, he assured me, had no connection beyond that one personnel overlap. "I wrote the check" for the ad, he said, acting for the S.C. Club for Growth. Cynics will sneer and say "yeah, right," but I know Ben, and I believe him. You’d have to talk to him for a while to understand why; he’s a clever guy, but there is no guile in him, as far as I can tell. He has that purity of belief that characterizes the true economic libertarian. Of course, there is no major philosophy in our politics today with which I disagree more, so Ben and I engaged in polite debate for the next half hour while I went here and there in the commercial maze of Harbison. Mostly, we talked about things that I cover in a previous posting, so I won’t bore you any more.
Related Posts
The Club for Growth is a Grover Norquist group. Norquist wants to “drown” our governmment “in a bathtub.” The members of the Club for Growth are as far right wing (and as un-American as you can get in my opinion).
While “drowning” our government, Mr. Norquist has no qualms about making big deals and big money off that same government (i.e. US taxpayers) and he and Ralph Reed are somehow involved in the current mess concerning Mr. Abramoff and our scandalous and unethical House leader Tom DeLay.
OOPS! I got my organizations mixed up in the last post. Americans for Tax Relief is the Norquist organization but Club for Growth is no different. They adhere to the same policies and ideas.
Club for Growth Policy Goals:
Making the Bush tax cuts permanent: (CODE: Making the rich richer while the working and middle class struggles).
Death tax repeal (CODE: Paris Hilton Tax for all those whose inherited wealth will no longer be taxed so that working and middle class folks pay even more taxes and have less to feed their families with).
Cutting and limiting government spending (CODE: bigger defense contracts to help out their corporate friends in the defense industry while cutting funding for military families, the poor and the aged).
Social Security reform with personal retirement accounts (CODE: Destroy the most successful program ever instated to ensure a dignified old age for the poorest Americans).
Expanding free trade
Legal reform to end abusive lawsuits (CODE: Protect huge insurance companies and their clients like doctors, pharmaceutical and other big corporations from being heavily fined when they pollute, maim, kill or cause other serious injuries to the average citizen who can not go up against their deep-pocketed resources).
Replacing the current tax code (CODE: make taxes an even greater burden on the lower classes while making the cream at the top richer due to their non-wage holdings like stocks, dividends, etc.).
School choice (CODE: re-SEGREGATE schools).
Regulatory reform and deregulation
(CODE: Let the robber barons rule and pollute at will! Never let the environment stand in the way of making $$$$$).
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