[mikemike]

What is the valid way(s) for people who have an interest in politics and money to participate in the system?

Should they only participate if they inherited their fortune and run for office like the Kennedys or Rockefellers?

Should they marry a rich person like McCain or Kerry?

Should they use their wealth to run for office like Ross Perot, Meg Whitman, David Koch, Darrell Issa, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Thomas Golisano, or Jon Corzine?

Should they just keep working and just influence the political process on the side like the Kochs, Soros, and hollywood actors?

[causey]

What is the valid way(s) for people who have an interest in politics and money to participate in the system?

Should they only participate if they inherited their fortune and run for office like the Kennedys or Rockefellers?

Should they marry a rich person like McCain or Kerry?

Should they use their wealth to run for office like Ross Perot, Meg Whitman, David Koch, Darrell Issa, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Thomas Golisano, or Jon Corzine?

Should they just keep working and just influence the political process on the side like the Kochs, Soros, and hollywood actors?

Ideally, people should participate to the political process as equal citizens. Money, connections, etc. are irrelevant to the questions concerning the rights and the responsibilities of a citizen, and, so, they should play no role in the political process. In an imperfect world, they can't not play a role--still, this role can be, and should be, minimized.

[Nesster]

There's no getting around the fact that being really rich, or in control of big business, or even being extremely well connected increases one's influence.

But saying this is not the same as excusing an anything goes attitude to this.

There is a difference between the extent the Koch brothers, say, have inserted their money and control into politics - or that Fox has - and the extend Soros and Hollywood actors have.

That is, to what degree does one use dollars to engineer reality?

Or, let's say the Communist International has Koch money to spend... they set up cells in each district and through propaganda and intimidation - and yes, votes - they manage to hijack the nomiating process. Elected officials must vote along Communist agenda lines or face large, angry opposition and the near certain end to their careers.

The Communists do their usual: anything the opposition proposes is rigidly opposed, even if the proposal contains communist ideas. The aim is not to govern as a democratic coalition, but rather to ensure the Communist party gains control in order to implement the Communist agenda.

[newarts]

...
Either way, if it is fine for someone who is not rich to voice their opinion and petition the government, it is fine for someone who is rich to do the same.

Mike you are right. It is fine for all to voice their opinion and petition the government. It is not fine for money to disproportionally amplify those voices.

Money is a best a crude measure of logical or social value; to allow it as a complete or preferable substitute is ridiculous.

Or government exists to act in behalf of its people - not their wealth.

It is ridiculous that the top 1% of the population should hold so much power over the people.

[mikemike]

There's no getting around the fact that being really rich, or in control of big business, or even being extremely well connected increases one's influence.

But saying this is not the same as excusing an anything goes attitude to this.

There is a difference between the extent the Koch brothers, say, have inserted their money and control into politics - or that Fox has - and the extend Soros and Hollywood actors have.

That is, to what degree does one use dollars to engineer reality?

Or, let's say the Communist International has Koch money to spend... they set up cells in each district and through propaganda and intimidation - and yes, votes - they manage to hijack the nomiating process. Elected officials must vote along Communist agenda lines or face large, angry opposition and the near certain end to their careers.

The Communists do their usual: anything the opposition proposes is rigidly opposed, even if the proposal contains communist ideas. The aim is not to govern as a democratic coalition, but rather to ensure the Communist party gains control in order to implement the Communist agenda.

That is not what the Kochs have done though, they are libertarians and have been for decades there isn't a single elected official in Washington DC that is a member of the Libertarian Party. There is no Koch conspiracy to buy the votes and time of rich old white people. How much do rich people charge for their votes and time? Not even billionaires could afford that.

The only thing distinguishing I see about the Kochs' political activism other than the fact that it does not fall along the traditional left/right axis of American politics is the longevity and persistence.

[Nesster]

Mike, casting aside my political preferences, there's a lot to distinguish and admire about the Kochs approach. They are far more thorough and long-sighted than most peers. It appears they set out to change American opinion, and did so systematically: think tanks and opinion factories, the co-opting or support of any political groups sympathetic, the behind the scenes (aka covert ) finanical and operational support of these groups and their events, the amplification of message via media contacts, and of late the seeming control of the Republican party politics via the Tea Party association, where they seem to own the nominating process. They support sitting politicians (e.g. Walker etc) who attempt to enact policies to their liking.

Put that together with the Republican leadership's stated goal of unseating Obama, and the tactics I described in the Communist example... and you have something unusual for America.

Yes, they are different than the GE's and Goldman's attempts at influencing law and policy: their interest is not strictly selfish (i.e. mainly for the advantage of their company or industry) but rather a wish to impose what to the mainstream is a radical view of government.

[jeffkrol]

The Kochtopus vs. Murray N. Rothbard by David Gordon
FOR fun.........

The "Kochtopus" is a derogatory name coined by the late Samuel Edward Konkin, III, an anarcho-libertarian, for the group of libertarian organizations funded by billionaire Charles Koch. (Konkin, a gifted wordsmith, also is responsible for the term "minarchism" for the libertarian view that accepts a minimal state.) Murray Rothbard often used this term when referring to organizations within the Koch ambit, with the Cato Institute foremost among them. To say the least, Rothbard's enthusiasm for Cato was not unbounded; and employees of the Kochtopus often treat Rothbard with hostility and contempt. Further, the Kochtopus has displayed unremitting hostility toward the organization with which Rothbard was associated from 1982 until his death in 1995, the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

Someone acquainted only with these facts would never suspect that Rothbard was a principal founder of Cato and that the organization had been established to promote his distinctive variety of libertarianism. From this beginning, how did it come about that Cato shifted course and now takes Rothbard to be an enemy?

To understand what happened, one must begin with Charles Koch. He and his brothers inherited an oil business from their father, Fred Koch, a stalwart of the John Birch Society and long active in rightwing causes. They developed and massively extended the family business, to the extent that Charles Koch and his brother David rank among the wealthiest people in the United States. On the current Fortune 400 list, the brothers are 9th and 10th, each with $17 billion; if the net worth of the brothers is taken together, the Kochs are second only to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

Charles, influenced from an early age by the pro-capitalist beliefs of his father, became interested in libertarianism. He attended Robert LeFevre's Freedom School and became acquainted with the work of Murray Rothbard. He met Rothbard and was so impressed with him and his ideas that he decided to endow an organization to promote libertarian theory and policies.

In this endeavor of his, Rothbard was a main collaborator.It was not widely known, but stockholders, who had the power to dismiss the Board of Directors, controlled the Cato Institute. The original stockholders were Charles Koch, Rothbard, an employee of Koch, and Edward Crane, whom Koch hired to run the day-to-day operations of the Institute. Koch, by his control of the majority of the stock, had absolute control of the newly formed group. Of course, he would have possessed a large measure of influence anyway, because he was by far the largest donor; but he wanted to ensure complete dominance.

Rothbard had some misgivings: might it not be unwise to rest so much on the good intentions of a single donor, however extensive his benefactions? Nevertheless, he embraced the new group with enthusiasm. Who would not be happy if one of the wealthiest men in the country embraced one's views and offered to set up an institute to promote them?.ect.........

Rothbard's differences with Crane and Koch went beyond this one political campaign. He thought that Cato's primary mission should be scholarship rather than political campaigns and attempts to secure audiences with the high and mighty in Washington. His antagonists emphatically disagreed.

Crane and Koch could not tolerate what they deemed blatant disloyalty. Even though Rothbard was the leading theorist of libertarianism and the Cato Institute had been established to promote his views, they expected him to obey the orders sent down from on high. No one at all acquainted with Rothbard could have reasonably expected him to do so. He was always his own man and would agree with Dante: "Follow your own course, and let the people say what they will."

Rothbard was removed from his position at Cato, and he was no longer invited to lecture at the summer conferences of the Institute for Humane Studies, another organization under Koch's patronage. Rothbard did not go quietly. He was, it will be recalled, a stockholder in the Cato Institute; and he intended to make clear his opposition to current policy at stockholders' meetings. In addition, his public criticisms would draw attention to a fact that Koch preferred to keep hidden, i.e., that the stockholders, principally Koch himself, and not the Board of Directors, held final control.

Koch and Crane were determined to prevent Rothbard from doing so. Koch refused to return Rothbard's shares, which he had supposedly been holding in safekeeping for him. When Rothbard appeared at the Cato offices for a stockholders' meeting, Crane informed him that his shares had been voided. Though the legality of this was eminently questionable, Rothbard elected not to pursue the case further. Lawsuits against billionaires often have unhappy endings.

Unfortunately, the efforts of the Kochtopus against the Mises Institute have continued to the present. The current campaign for the presidency of Ron Paul has secured for libertarian ideas a greater public hearing than ever before. But owing to Paul's long association with Rothbard and Rockwell, his campaign had little appeal to Cato. High officials of Cato cooperated with James Kirchick's malicious smears against him in The New Republic. (After his losing Senate campaign to Phil Gramm, Paul had been employed by Koch as chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy, but his contract was not renewed. Like Rothbard, Ron Paul is a man of principle and would not compromise on his advocacy of the gold standard and opposition to the Federal Reserve System. Charles Koch did not want this: such measures would hardly help him gain influence with the Republican Party, to which, if I am not mistaken, he and his brother are the largest private contributors.Further, Paul would have no part of Koch's efforts to have the CSE, beneath free market rhetoric, lobby to promote legislation beneficial to his business interests.) It should come as no surprise that Matt Welch, the new editor of Reason, has published a viciously negative piece against Rockwell and Paul. Koch is a large funder of the magazine, and, as Murray Rothbard learned to his cost, he expects those he funds to obey his dictates.

---

Last edited by jeffkrol; 10-27-2011 at 01:41 PM.

[jeffkrol]

part 3 in part

After the heat of battle had subsided, Rothbard offered in the last published issue of Libertarian Forum a retrospective analysis of the Kochtopus and its problems. Koch had established the Cato Institute to promote an ideologically consistent libertarianism. "The idea was that C.K. [Charles Koch] would (and indeed did) pour in millions in promoting institutions that would find and gather the best and the brightest of the libertarian movement, mobilized by the so-called organizing ability of Eddie Crane. The object was to promote a consistent ideology of hard-core and uncompromising radical libertarianism, of which Misesianism was the economic arm."

Looking back, Rothbard thought that the "heady excitement" of the founding of Cato led people to be blind to two problems: "(1) A monopoly of any movement lacks the essential feedback and checks and balances that competition always brings…; (2) Almost comparably to government action, throwing lots of money at a problem doesn’t always solve it. C. K. threw enormous amounts of money too fast at people (many who turned out to be turkeys) to people who scarcely deserved it."

Rothbard again drew attention to the "paradigm shift" of 1979 – the abandonment of libertarian principle. He now raised a deeper question: what accounted for this drastic change? "The key to the puzzle is not the inept, blundering Crane but the motivations of the Donor, C.K…. Charles’s goals in all this have been unique and twofold….What Charles demands above-all is absolute, unquestioning loyalty; and that is something that Crane, above all others, was equipped to give him…. Those few…who placed libertarian principle above going along with the latest twist and turn of the Kochtopusian program, have all been ruthlessly cast aside.... Control for C. K. also means the willingness of his top managers to speak to him an hour every day, to go over and clear with the Donor every aspect, no matter how minor, of the day’s decisions."

Granted Koch’s desire for control, though, how does this explain the paradigm shift? Rothbard argued that despite his immense wealth, Koch wanted the funding of libertarian groups to be undertaken by others. His initial grants were intended as seed money, and he hoped that others would take up the cause. Roy Childs persuaded Koch that abandoning principle for the paradigm shift would attract new money. "And so 1979 saw the beginning of the radical paradigm shift within the mighty Kochtopus, i.e., the accelerating abandonment of hard-core principle in order to attract outside funding."

Rothbard concluded his analysis with an account of the supplanting of Crane as Koch’s chief political agent. Richie Fink proved even more able than Crane to attract outside funding. "The path was now cleared for young Richie, and the Great Kochtopusian Revolution now occurred, during the spring and summer of 1984. The baby Finktopus, son of the Kochtopus, was born…. Fink now heads up the lobbying-activist program, luring the masses into supporting the new activism. But to get the masses you can’t be hard-core, at least so runs the Kochtopusian conventional wisdom…. Richie Fink is now in charge, not only of most scholarship... but also in charge of most Kochtopusian activism…. Crane is left in charge only of Cato." It only remains to add that Fink remains the key figure in the Kochtopus to this day.

[jeffkrol]

Sorry, from pt. 2

As mentioned in Part I, the Kochtopus strongly opposes the Mises Institute, which aims to continue the Rothbardian policy of Austrian economics, laissez-faire, and peace that Cato was established to promote. The opposition continues to the present day. Reason, now under Koch patronage, did not react to Ron Paul's The Revolution: A Manifesto with the praise one would expect for this best-selling libertarian book. David Weigel, in a post of April 30, 2008 on the Reason website, took the occasion to attack Lew Rockwell and other so-called "paleos." The Kochtopus cannot forgive those who continue to champion Murray Rothbard.

[jeffkrol]

To stay on the Orwell.. Rockwellian course.......
AGAIN it's not how much you spend but WHERE... ALL emotion taking out of it and looking at purely economics.. FED buying every last mortgage and turning over title to the owners and right now we would need to TAX the bejezzus out of the economy to stop inflation.....

It should be obvious to everyone but the most dedicated adherent of Keynesianism that the stimulus did not accomplish its end. The combination of outright spending by Congress, the desperate schemes to reflate the housing market, the attempt to transfuse bleeding firms with other people’s money, and the creation of trillions in artificial money, has not done a thing to lift the US economy.

Actually, the reverse has been true. All these efforts have prevented the adjustment of economic forces to the post-boom world. And all the resources that the stimulus consumed were extracted from the private sector, for we must always remember that government has no resources of its own. Everything it does must come from the hides of private producers and the citizenry in general, in the future if not immediately.

Makes ABSOLUTELY no sense.. The banks are SITTING on it.....because the consumer is dying.....

[jeffkrol]

But there is an even more serious problem. In the course of stimulating the economy, the Fed has created incredible amounts of fake money that it has stuffed in the vaults of its best friends in the banking industry. And those phony reserves seem now to be leaking out to cause horrific waves of price inflation.

http://lewrockwell.com/rockwell/many-collapses-of-keynesianism189.html

Can ANYONE offer ANY credible proof to this statement??? I'm curious................

[Nesster]

Don't worry, they will hire actors and iStockDollars to create the impression of whatever it is they want the world to be.

The case of Rothbard is in its way Libertarian justice.

[GeneV]

Rothbard, who feels Adam Smith was a proto-socialist because he accepted the concept of progressive taxation.

[mikemike]

Put that together with the Republican leadership's stated goal of unseating Obama, and the tactics I described in the Communist example... and you have something unusual for America.

That example is not what the Kochs do but is exactly the role of the DCCC, RCCC, DSCC, RSCC, and every local political machine which are associated with a specific major party. Libertarians are lucky to maintain ballot access in every state and would be lucky if it could be a recognized political party for voter registration in every state - one of the few issues both Democrats and Republicans seem to be able to cooperate on.

Yes, they are different than the GE's and Goldman's attempts at influencing law and policy: their interest is not strictly selfish (i.e. mainly for the advantage of their company or industry) but rather a wish to impose what to the mainstream is a radical view of government.

So this is the crux of the problem... free speech isn't there to protect popular speech, now is it? At one point in history, representative democracy was a radical view of government to the mainstream. Don't almost all views start out as radical? The Libertarian party is the third largest political party in the USA and there are large numbers of libertarians who are registered as independents and who vote outside of the Libertarian party for pragmatic reasons. While you might perceive it as being out of the mainstream, in fact they share an ideology which resonates with a great many people.

[Nesster]

Mike, while I have sympathy for quite a bit of Libertarian thought, I have problems with some of the over-reaching that's being pushed of late - e.g. rewriting the history of Hoover and the Depression.... And I would have trouble with the Koch approach even (or especially) if it were liberal. The degree of thought control and loyality demanded just doesn't sit right with my Libertarian impulses While I wish the liberals would be better organized and simply play the game better, I'd hate for there to be greater thought straight-jackets imposed.