Mason, you must be writing about the others and not me. I wrote 
nothing that even implies anti-statism. I resent your insinuation 
that I did. This thread started with a question about why modern 
economists had not heard of great economists in the history of 
economics like Knight. My suggested answer said that government 
funding of universities and bureaucracy leads to standard setting and 
teaching that is in the interests of the bureaucrats. Why, I asked, 
would one expect government funding of universities and the 
consequent bureaucratization lead to the study of Knight? Wouldn't 
one expect the reverse?

Perhaps you did not realize that I was writing about bureaucracy. 
Government funding over any length of time always leads to 
bureaucracy because rules to protect against fraud and misuse must be 
established to administer the funding. Private funding may or may not 
lead to this.
As for a "fair and balanced" approach, government funding of 
universities comes from taxpayers through legislators. Legislators 
may be right, left, or center if such labels are meaningful. But they 
tend to favor more spending on just about everything. Private funding 
comes from a variety of people each of whom is likely to have some 
political ideology. I suspect that because people in business tend to 
earn more than those in other fields, more university funding comes 
from people who favor free enterprise and private property rights 
than from those who favor curbs on these and, implicitly, larger 
government. I do not know of a study showing this, however; so, I 
might be wrong.  In any case, teachers at these universities are 
still one step removed from the profit incentive. So, regardless of 
the political persuasion of benefactors, they have some incentive to 
set the publishing standards and create publishing opportunities in a 
way that (1) minimizes the effort needed to administer them and (2) 
best advance the careers of those who are likely to bring them the 
most advantage. Example: Writing papers on Knight at the University 
of Chicago or the University of Iowa would be a good career move. But 
elsewhere, say Italy, it would make more sense to study Pareto or, 
more to the point, some modern economist whose ideas can be 
represented with a mathematical model.

Pat Gunning