Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

Humiliatingly small and eclipsed by the derision of millions.

When we show up, we win.

We need to vote them all out and restore sane Democratic government.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

One way or another, he’s a liar.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

The revolution will be supervised.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

To the privileged, equality seems like oppression.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

The willow is too close to the house.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Freewheeling marketplace of ideas

Freewheeling marketplace of ideas

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It sounds like Cato is purging itself of non-believers (via):

The libertarian Cato Institute is parting with two of its most prominent scholars. Brink Lindsey, the institute’s vice president of research and the author of the successful book The Age of Abundance, is departing to take a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Will Wilkinson, a Cato scholar, collaborator with Lindsey, and editor of the online Cato Unbound, is leaving on September 15; he just began blogging politics for the Economist.

I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term “Liberaltarians” to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right’s fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.

I believe Cato’s funding is largely from the Koch family. I’m hoping to read the New Yorker piece on the Kochs this evening.

Reader Interactions

43Comments

  1. 1.

    Stooleo

    The New Yorker piece is elucidating and depressing. Shows what you can do with unlimited funds and a messianic view for America.

  2. 2.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    Is this really that surprising? What passes for mainstream libertarianism (CATO, Reason, etc) have always been shills for the GOP. Torture, unlimited executive power? Who gives a shit. HCR? Oh noes, Stalinism unleashed!!!!

    As Weigel’s drift Teabaggerwards has shown, they are all pretty pathetic fuckers.

    Amanda

    +2

  3. 3.

    Amanda in the South Bay

    I mean what passes for establishment libertarians, (as fuckers) not anyone in particular (like any commenters here).

  4. 4.

    jl

    News on the infotaineurial conservatarian front is coming too fast and furious to keep up.

    This story, if it turns out to be one, will be worth watching

    For sale: Conservative bloggers and (possibly) Mike Huckbaee
    Are bloggers getting extra “advertising” cash from campaigns? And is Mike Huckabee’s endorsement for sale?
    Alex Pareene at Salon

    salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/08/23/bloggers_for_sale/index.html

    Cole is an apostate to the cause, so I doubt he could attract any conservopayloa. But then there is the mystery of who pays for TunchFeed. And now there is Rosie. Something is up since Cole is putting it out the ridiculous notion that Rosie is losing weight. Why would say such obvious nonsense? (A desperate attempt to cover his tracks?).

  6. 6.

    Violet

    It’s like the purity purges of the party in the old Soviet Union. There just aren’t that many totally pure individuals out there.

  7. 7.

    Incertus (Brian)

    Well, if their policies were ever in danger of being fully realized, it might damage them beyond all recognition, so better to do the purge now and forestall that eventuality.

  8. 8.

    freelancer

    From Jane Mayer’s Article:

    The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”
    Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

    Jesus Christ on a cracker, you could splay this all over Glenn Beck and the wingnut response would be “just Soros funded propaganda”.

  10. 10.

    parsimon

    A number of previously self-professed libertarians have been rethinking their positions, I believe.

  11. 11.

    Belvoir

    I’ve only read the first page of the New Yorker article (out of ten), and it looks promising. A nice corrective at least to New York magazine’s tongue-bath of Charles Koch recently. These people need to be exposed, these “think tanks” and “Institutes”. There’s too many to remember. Enterprise! Competitiveness! Family Research! Where the hell do they get all this money? From people like the Koch brothers. Whose conglom pulls in $100 billion a year, according to this article. One hundred billion dollars a year to wage war against the government, Obama, health care, labor laws, environmental laws, you name it. If it’s in the service of evil and to the detriment of our society, they will throw billions at it as they hide in the shadows. I don’t care what they give to museums and the ballet, these are seriously malevolent forces at work here, and they need some exposure to daylight.

  12. 12.

    WereBear

    @freelancer: That’s meaty with awesome sauce.

    What is it about having gobs of money that drives people insane? I once read a book about the Vanderbilts, and by the fourth generation they were drinking themselves to death unless they used a gun for suicide.

  17. 17.

    MikeJ

    @WereBear: How much you have at stake is up to you, if you’ve got the needs of the body covered comfortably for life. I’ve never believed in the “nobility” of work qua work. Your life has as much meaning as you give it. Being forced to flip burgers doesn’t make you a better person than someone who has everything handed to him on a silver platter. There are some perfectly lovely rich people and some complete assholes who toil in the fields.

  19. 19.

    minachica

    Am I the only one who finds it intriguing that Obama’s mom (Ann Dunham) was born in Wichita KS around the same time as the Koch brothers?
    I only noticed because I grew up in Wichita — and, as much as I hate to admit it, managed to escape Wichita thanks to a Koch-sponsored scholarship. I didn’t know they were evil back then.
    I got cold sweats reading the New Yorker profile.

  21. 21.

    shecky

    After all that time pumping up my libertarian cred by going, “WTF with barber licensing?”, my dreams of becoming a Cato fellow go up in smoke.

    Or do they???

    I can’t help but laugh every time the Right kicks more folks out of the tent and hem up all the slack. It’s gotta be getting pretty cozy in there by now.

  22. 22.

    Triassic Sands

    The New Yorker has great articles, but can I justify spending the time necessary to read a long magazine article about two rich libertarians? Libertarians are dumb, but a couple of libertarians with billions of dollars could be really dangerous.

    OK, the article is by Jane Mayer. That makes it worth a look.

  25. 25.

    MikeJ

    @shecky: Hours too late, I return to ripping cds and run across an early 90s gem that would have been apropos:

    Now I’m a fan of Morgan Fairchild.
    Her big ol’ hair makes me crazy and wild.
    I fantasize about Marie Antoinette.
    She had five-foot hair before Final Net.

    I need a B-52 beehive girl
    with a twisty do like a DQ swirl.
    I see all that hair goin’ to waste.
    Every time I say it, I get maced.

  26. 26.

    gex

    @WereBear: Which interestingly suggests that these trust fund babies might have had more fulfilling lives if the estate tax had caused them to have to strive for something, anything.

  27. 27.

    Anne Laurie

    @WereBear:

    What is it about having gobs of money that drives people insane?

    I’d argue there’s a particular form of psychosis that drives an individual to collect ‘gobs of money’ as a displacement for other, more socially functional goals. People like the Kochs act as though the raw amount of MONEY is the supremely interesting / important goal, which too often means treating objects, properties, and people as ‘markers’, objects to be manipulated for the further accumulation & protection of the Money. We laugh at, or pity, people whose lives revolve around hoarding Elvis memorabilia, or Beanie Babies, or just plain junk, but people who channel their OCD impulses into hoarding dollars get to use the power of those dollars to re-arrange our whole political structure to enable them to better acquire and hoard more dollars.

  28. 28.

    DougJ

    @shecky:

    After all that time pumping up my libertarian cred by going, “WTF with barber licensing?”, my dreams of becoming a Cato fellow go up in smoke.

    That made me laugh.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    @Anne Laurie: Yes, it’s Hoarders, using Real Lives!

    And they fall for it too; I’m rich, why don’t people love me? Why aren’t I running more things? Why isn’t my ass being kissed?

    A lot of it is compensation for not having, you know, actual qualities. I’ve known nice rich people; but they were either not born that way, or raised by people who actually care.

    While neglecting your children takes a hideous form when you’re poor, the ultimate product is only cosmetically better when you’re rich. I hark back to hanging out with the teenaged children of rich people, and most of them were Less than Zero (before the book, but I was familiar with the form.)

    They were just another charm for their parent’s bracelet, and they knew it. They could get a car by whining for it, and then it was never good enough. The thing about them was how oddly passionless they were. To actually enjoy something was not only uncool; it was alien to them.

    They live without knowing pleasure, unless they get it from drugs or psychotic manipulation. Not all of them, of course.

    But a lot of them.

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    Wow. This is good stuff. I guess the only question is whether “principaled” libertarians will understand the degree to which they have been played by oligarchs, and whether they will have the smarts and guts to fight back.

    It’s been a tough decade for libertarians. The Bush/Cheney regime made it clear that they were champions of narrow business interests, not the free market, and libertarians choked on it and kept punching out their happy talk bullshit.

    Then, Dubya dropped the other shoe and made it clear that he was deeply down with the most anti-rational, anti-science, narrowly religious fundamentalists, and the libertarians just choked it down some more and kept punching out their happy talk bullshit. Libertarians could pretend to be tough minded rationalists, but it’s strange that they didn’t see that they had been kicked to the dustbin of conservatism.

    Now, the oligarchs make is plain that they intend to make libertarians their bitch.

    And they expect to be obeyed.

  32. 32.

    Bob

    Six or eight months ago I had an exchange over at E.D’s place, LOOG. I said I was starting to worry as I was agreeing more and more with Will W. Strange days.

  33. 33.

    Bob

    @parsimon:

    A number of previously self-professed libertarians have been rethinking their positions, I believe.

    I wonder if it might have something to do with ineffectual libertarian understanding of the real world, The 00’s certainly did not work out well. Even Greenspan had to admit he did not understand free markets.

  34. 34.

    Platonicspoof

    __

    Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle

    That critique at The AmP has some interesting links in it (the critique itself hardly seems cause for disqualification from the CATO Club – agreement on goals, but different analyses).
    From the AmP article:
    “. . . Ireland, the Netherlands and, by a wide margin, Denmark were found to have freer markets [than the U.S.]”

    And:
    “A 2001 paper ‘Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?’ . . . . , provides powerful evidence that race is at the center of the story”.

    And there are a couple more in there on American attitudes worth knowing about (minus the libertarian, etc., interpretations).

  36. 36.

    burnspbesq

    From the Alesina et al paper that Lindsey links to:

    Racial discord plays a critical role in determining beliefs about the poor. Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. Across countries, racial fragmentation is a powerful predictor of redistribution. Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state.

    No shit, Sherlock.

  37. 37.

    Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)

    @burnspbesq: This. I had goose bumps reading the article. At least this exposes the Koch brothers’ activities to the wider world. But given the Citizens United ruling, I shudder what to think they’ll do to derail candidates whose views don’t tally with their business interests and profits. Then there’s the fact that one of the Koch brothers sits on the National Cancer Institutes’ advisory board while his companies fight the NIH re overwhelming proof from scientific studies that formaldehyde used in the manufacturing process is a human carcinogen. This bit about their father also made my stomach turn:

    In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

    So we have members of the lucky sperm club fighting to preserve and expand the empire handed down to them by their father even if it means the rest of us get lower standards of living, the deleterious effects of man made warming and no social safety net. I wish it was possible to deport the Kochs to the libertarian utopia called Somalia.

  38. 38.

    Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)

    Oops. Not sure what word in my previous post tripped the moderation filter. To sum it all up, the Koch’s suck big time but at least their activities are now exposed.

  40. 40.

    silentbeep

    ok I was listening to a reason.tv episode and listened to a little bit of what brick lindsay had to say regarding where libertarians fit into the grand left-right scheme of things

    reason.com/blog/2010/08/23/brink-lindsey-and-will-wilkins

    Now he said something that just cracked me up, sitting next to Jonah Goldberg no less:

    “contemporary conservative politics is dominated by angry white guys and the women who love them.”

    LOLOL

  41. 41.

    Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)

    @Mnemosyne: Ah of course. I didn’t notice that the word social1st was in the excerpt I quoted.

    Funny that three different people forwarded me the New Yorker article DougJ linked to today. Maybe there’s a match for the Koch’s out there.

  43. 43.

    Michael

    In a truly just world, the “meritocratic” heir Koch brothers would have to have the undersides of their limos swept for bombs every time they left their homes and would need to employ food testers.

    The world would be a much better place if each of them were spectacularly whacked on pay-per-view.

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