Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson Leaving Cato

Lindsey, a Reason Contributing Editor who was Cato's vice president for research, now joins the Kauffman Foundation, where he will be identifying "structural reforms needed to revive entrepreneurial innovation, firm formation and job creation in the wake of the Great Recession." Wilkinson, co-author of a forthcoming book with Lindsey with the tentative title The Free Market Progressive: How We Can Use Capitalist Acts Between Consenting Adults to Create Peace, Prosperity, and Justice, announced in a blog post entitled "The Liberaltarian Diaspora" that his last day with Cato will be Sept. 15.

Over at Slate, David Weigel asks whether this represents "a purge at the Cato Institute," gets no-comments from Wilkinson and Cato, and reprints a friendly internal memo from Cato President Ed Crane.

Read Lindsey's agenda-setting contribution to our August/September cover forum, "Where Do Libertarians Belong?" And watch him talk about it in person below:

In other inside-libertarianism news, The New Yorker has a long Jane Mayer profile on Charles and David Koch, the billionaire industrialists who have financed several libertarian and conservative institutions (David is on the Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees). The New Yorker headline, consistent with the dot-connecting tone of Mayer's prose, is: "Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama."

For much more on the topic by someone who actually interviewed the Kochs (and appears throughout the Mayer article), read Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.