The Apple of a Think Tank’s Eye

Inside the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a few blocks from Grand Central Station in downtown Manhattan, life still isn’t completely back to normal, said spokeswoman Lindsay Young. And it may never be.

The terrorist strikes on the city have prompted the tank to reshuffle its research priorities and refocus attention on its home town.

“This is our back yard,” said Young, in Washington yesterday for a tank-sponsored event on telecommunications. The institute already had people working on New York fiscal issues, infrastructure and rebuilding. “We just redirected them to work more specifically.”

E.J. McMahon, a senior fellow studying New York’s tax and spending policies, said, “This catastrophe . . . puts the city’s finances and the city’s economy in a whole new light.” He said the best estimate is that city revenue will be down $ 1.5 billion this year alone.

Before Sept. 11, McMahon said, “there was a tremendous boom in city tax revenues” as a result of the city’s private-sector employment growth rate. “The city had accumulated a $ 3 billion surplus, but much of that was going to be consumed this year and next year because the revenues were falling off due to the economic slowdown.”

The conservative tank also will be focused on how best to rebuild Lower Manhattan. “One of the cruel ironies of the attack was that while the World Trade Center was thought of as a world-famous symbol of capitalism and free enterprise, the complex was really the product of a Rockefeller-era publicly financed boondoggle,” he said. “We’ll be closely analyzing and critiquing the details of the rebuilding plan and the financing as they emerge.”

The Manhattan Institute raised staff spirits by continuing with a Sept. 20 event that gave out $ 10,000 social entrepreneurship awards to four New York groups, including a small credit union that teaches financial literacy to new immigrants and a military-style after-school program for troubled youth in Buffalo called JUMP (Junior Uniformed Mentoring Program).

Attendance was high, but “people were still really on edge,” Young said. Seeing the young people from JUMP in military-style uniforms, they immediately “thought we had extra security.”

RIGHTS VS. SECURITY: Individual rights do not necessarily have to be the first casualty of America’s newly declared war on terrorism, said Roger Pilon, director of the Center for Constitutional Studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“We don’t necessarily have to have a trade-off of security for liberty,” Pilon said. “It may turn out that we simply need to order affairs of government more smartly.”

Pilon will chair a panel at 4 p.m. today at Cato headquarters, which will explore what, if anything, the federal government can do to protect citizens from terrorists — and from those who would take away their rights in the name of waging war on terrorists.

The featured speaker, Rep. Robert L. Barr Jr. (R-Ga.), is often incendiary. Barr is expected to offer a “skeptical” critique of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s wish list of changes, such as proposals that would make it easier for federal agents to tap into voice mail and e-mail messages and eavesdrop on cell phone conversations. Also on the panel are journalist Stuart Taylor, Solveig Singleton of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University.

Pilon acknowledged that the individual rights vs. security issue is tricky for Cato’s libertarian-leaning thinkers. Libertarians like their government small and unintrusive. And Pilon said virtually every major war fought by the United States has been marked by state-sanctioned rights abuses and government growth.

“But we also believe that the first premise of government is to protect us from threats at home and abroad,” Pilon said. “What we have here is a monumental government failure to do the basic thing that we create government to do: protect our rights.”

“We need to figure out exactly why this failure occurred,” he said, and whether proposals such as Ashcroft’s will actually help track down terrorists, or merely infringe on the rights of average Americans. “Was it that federal agencies couldn’t talk to each other because of privacy laws, or that they didn’t talk to each other because of bureaucratic inertia? There’s a difference there, and it’s an important difference.”

PEOPLE: Joseph Antos, former assistant director for health and human resources at the Congressional Budget Office, has joined the American Enterprise Institute as a resident scholar.

The Progress and Freedom Foundation has hired Kent Lassman to run its new Digital Policy Network, which will focus on providing state governments, state- level research institutes and others with relevant information on communications and Internet issues. Lassman comes from Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Dana White is the new director of the Washington Roundtable for the Asia-Pacific Press, founded in 1994 by the Heritage Foundation to serve as a liaison between its Asian Studies Center and Asian media representatives in Washington. She comes from the Fox News Channel, where she was a publicist.

The fledgling Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, formed with the substantial proceeds from the sale of Cooke’s Redskins, continues to staff up as it clarifies its mission as an educational philanthropy. The foundation recently announced that Joshua Wyner — who has been running the D.C. Appleseed Center for the past six years — will serve as chief program officer. Mark Birmingham came from the Freedom Forum in the spring to serve as chief financial officer.