Kathy J Hayes

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Professor Kathy Hayes was a cash for comments economist from Northern Illinois University who worked in a range of projects for the tobacco industry. In fact, she was working for the Tobacco Institute as a consultant before the formal recruitment of economist into the clandestine network. She only remained within the network for a few years. (She transfered later to the Southern Methodist University in Dallas.)

These were libertarian academic economists who secretly worked on commission for the tobacco industry through the Tobacco Institute. The network was set up in November 1982 by James Savarese (working through his own company and Ogilvy & Mather PR) with later expansion nationwide through Professor Robert Tollison of George Mason University.

Tollison and Savarese acted as contractors and cut-outs, using the Center fof Study of Public Choice at GMU, which supplied the adminstration staff. They recruited ultra-libertarian economics professors at the major state universities through the Public Choice Society and various regional economics societies.

The problem is not that these scientists were ultra-libertarians, and that many of them were Tea-Party disciples of Ayn Rand, Frederick Hayek and/or Ludwig von Misen. Nor was it necessarily made worse by the fact that the industry they helped prosper made a product that caused the premature death of about four million people globally each year. The problem is fundamentally that they were paid a salary from the State to teach an independent disciplin of economics at a state university -- then preached the moral superiority of the unfettered free-market -- while taking health financial back-handers from the worst type of corporation with absolutely no sense of morality, or any actual practical value (in fact the reverse)