‘Weekly Standard’: Problems With Foundation Prizes

The Bradley Prizes, which offer $250,000 apiece to prominent conservatives, are an example of conservatives’ “taking a liberal idea, aping it, and managing to make it dumber,” writes Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at The Weekly Standard magazine (March 7).

The prizes are given out by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee. Mr. Ferguson compares the Bradley prizes to the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius awards,” which give $500,000 to recipients with no strings attached. “Slinging around great bags of money, with no expectation of return, and professing uninterest in the effects the windfall might have, really does seem like one of those ideas that only a liberal could think was terrific,” Mr. Ferguson writes.

Like the MacArthur awards, the Bradley prizes are given to people nominated by scores of prominent individuals who remain anonymous, he says. But the awards have differences and the biggest one “lies in the recipients themselves,” he writes.

“Unlike MacArthur’s grantees, the Bradley recipients are political or cultural conservatives, each an estimable personage of genuine accomplishment,” he writes. “Genius grants more often than not go to people in obscure or humble circumstances. The Bradley Prize, in a unique twist, is awarded to people who don’t need it.”

The prize, says Mr. Ferguson, “amounts to a parody of what liberals say conservatives always want to do anyway — in tax cuts for example: boost the circumstances of people whose circumstances don’t need boosting, pass lots of money to people who already have lots of money.”

The article is available on the magazine’s Web site, http://www.weeklystandard.com.