Washington DC leads the world in the production of conventional wisdom, and its well-paid pundits are marketed as a commodity throughout the mass media. The pundit factories are called "think tanks," and they put out catalogs, cross-referenced by approved subject headings, of in-house hack scholars. It's a bit like promoting safe sex for reporters: when they need a soundbite or quotation to create the appearance of objectivity on a given issue, but don't want to risk their jobs by propagating unconventional ideas, they just whip out a scholar directory for one of these think tanks.
The American Enterprise Institute directory contains a short paragraph
on each of 41 scholars, including past affiliations and a notation of previous
publications. AEI was founded in 1943, and for years was thought of as the
Republican alternative to the "liberal" Brookings Institution. By 1985 their
budget was $12 million, of which 45 percent was provided by corporations who
were getting rich from the supply-side, anti-regulatory economics that AEI
promoted. After supporting Goldwater in 1964, AEI wasn't respectable until
the Ford administration. During the Reagan years they became powerful, and
Brookings found itself moving toward the right just to stay in the game.
Extract the names from this source