“And one thing I really get off this article is that the Koches are able to sell their ridiculous ideas to the public not just because they spread money around like it’s cream cheese, but because they themselves believe their own bullshit.”

True, but just keep in mind that George Soros and all the money he gives to liberals and liberal causes are what is ruining the political climate in America…

(...which the same nutbags also take as the gospel truth, while conveniently ignoring the Kochs and all the other suppliers of Wingnut Welfare.  Hell, Rupert Murdoch alone has probably had more influence, god damn him, than any figure on the left in decades…)

Wow. Haven’t had the chance to go & read the article yet but this post has me thinking.

I’ve often wondered why people think that they have to have ALL the money. There’s more than enough out there to go around (so to speak). You can still be insanely wealthy while allowing other people attain wealth too. Is it some sort of wierd competitiveness?

I’ve often wondered why people think that they have to have ALL the money. There’s more than enough out there to go around (so to speak).

I’ve always wondered this myself.  Really, there is such a thing as too much—I wouldn’t know what to do with billions of dollars.  Hell, even millions of dollars.  I really, really don’t get it.  I’d be perfectly content with having enough to pay off the mortgage, send the kids to college without going into insane debt, and maybe take a nice vacation every couple of years.  More than that just seems unnecessary.

Let’s think about this in their terms, and not in ours.  If you believe money serves people, as we do, there is such a thing as “enough” money, and you don’t resent other people doing well.  The point of money is to serve people, after all!

But if you believe that people exist to serve money, then wealth doesn’t count unless it’s contrasted dramatically with poverty.  Huge gaps between the have and have-nots are mandatory, in your view.  Money is an abstract measure of your worth in the system.  If others have it, it is a slam against your ego.  This isn’t about what money could buy you.  It’s what money *means*.  Under that system, even things like shelter, food, and health care should only go to those at the top.

“You can still be insanely wealthy while allowing other people attain wealth too. Is it some sort of wierd competitiveness?”

...because there are some men (and it seems to almost always be men) whose need to show the world they have the biggest dick simply knows no bounds. 

I’ve heard it said (attributed to Bill Gates, but…) that it isn’t about the money.  Money is just how you keep score.  I’m not sure I buy that completely, but I do think there’s some truth in that statement.  But the real thing they get is power.  Raw, naked, boundless power.

Some quotes from O’Brien in 1984:
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

“The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.”

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
Winston thought. ‘By making him suffer,’ he said.”

...

I’ve often wondered why people think that they have to have ALL the money. There’s more than enough out there to go around (so to speak).

It makes more sense if you think of the Kochs and other wealthy libertarians as people who think of money as power. The more money you have, the more power you have. And when people who have no money are able to get some money, through good jobs, benefits for the needy, or anything else, the Kochs don’t see it as people able to feed their families—they see it as a lot of poor people gaining power. And anyone who gains power is a threat to their own power base.

It’s a completely psychotic worldview, but I think that is how they see the world.

The idea that humans exist to serve institutions and that money exists to be earned and hoarded rather than spent, even on yourself, is a dangerous one. First, its dangerous for all the reasons why Amanada listed above. It also partly explains why rightists seem better at politics than leftists, using the broadest definition of both rightist or leftist. Since to rightist people only exist to serve instiutions, they can devote ridiculous amounts of time to the rightist cause. Leftists, ranging from liberals to much further out, generally realize that people have their own lives and interests to pursue and shouldn’t have to devote everything to liberal institutions. There have been exceptions like the various Communist movements, where total devotion to the cause was expected.

  That being said, I wonder whether how easy its going to be for the rich wingnuts to install their value systems in future generations of rich wingnuts. During the First Gilded Age, their economic ancestors tried to install similar values into their children and at best it lasted one generation. By the first generation of rich wingnuts had grandchildren, the grandchildren wanted to party and spend thier money on luxury goods. Many times, the values didn’t even last one generation. Actual banking mechanisms needed to be developed to prevent the heirs from spending too much money.

  Mark at 2: Generally, the ultra-rich seek to limit the wealth of others and hoard it from themselves because they view it as a zero-sum game. If other people are doing well, even if very modestly, that means that they are doing less well. To many ultra-wealthy people, vast slums are a sign of their wealth. Plus, people living in shanties are easier to dominate and control.

Or what MikeEss said. 

But if you believe that people exist to serve money, then wealth doesn’t count unless it’s contrasted dramatically with poverty.

It’s even worse than that, and you see it in the elder Koch’s indoctrination of his children. If you believe that people exist to serve money, then even rich people exist to serve money. Their job is to serve as stewards of the family fortune and pass it on undiminished (or preferably enormously enlarged) to the next (albeit undeserving) generation. Sure, they deserve all the perks they get for performing this essential job (just as the fathers of the church—ahem—are humble despite the luxury in which they live), but they consider themselves essentially keepers of the flame. Which, as you say, is far worse than open love of either power or luxury.

But I think it may be a misnomer to call these types libertarians, even in a derogatory sense. They are all about using the power of government to funnel money to them in the form of subsidies, to crush critics and competitors—just the way Rand Paul wants a continuing flow of tax dollars to him in the form of Medicare reimbursements.

First, I wanted to mention that it was ExiledOnline that first broke ground on this story and has been all over it, showing how the Koch family basically laid down the Astroturf for the Teabaggers using dupes and shills like Santelli and McArdle. It’s rough and tumble stuff and language, but they really deserve the credit for showing how the Kochs are the primary sugar daddies for Libertarian wingnut welfare.

I’m sure the New Yorker piece adds a lot, and in a family friendly manner, so thanks for posting it. I look forward to reading it.

While I think there are definitely political operators who are purely cynical, like Karl Rove, in general most wingnuts, even the rich ones, are true believers.  And one thing I really get off this article is that the Koches are able to sell their ridiculous ideas to the public not just because they spread money around like it’s cream cheese, but because they themselves believe their own bullshit.

That’s fair. The most successful salesmen truly believe in their product, even if it’s snake oil. It’s sort of a variation on George Costanza’s maxim: “It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true.”

Depriving someone of a childhood to instill a work ethic in them is a great way to bring someone up who doesn’t understand the value of work or of non-work life.

There’s a balance. Making money for money’s sake is a pointless and joyless excercise in score-keeping. In a NY Press article I’m fond of quoting, Mark Ames (I’m really not shilling for Exiled Online here) describes the first case:

Republican elites don’t set off the spite glands in the same way, and it’s not only because of a sinister right-wing propaganda machine. Take a look at a photo of the late billionaire Sam Walton, a dried-out Calvinist in a baseball cap and business suit, and you’ll see why. If Republican billionaires enjoy their wealth, they sure as hell hide it well. As far as one can tell, Republican billionaires genuinely like working 18-hour days in offices. Their idea of having fun is a day on the golf green (a game as slow and frustrating as a day in the office) or attending conferences with other sleazy, cheerless Calvinist billionaires. If that’s what all their wealth got them, let ‘em have itso says the spite bloc. This explains why the Republican elitethe only true and all-powerful elite in America todayis not considered an “elitist” class in the spleens of the white male have-nots. Elitism as defined today is a synonym for “happy,” not “rich” or “powerful.” Happiness is the scarcest resource of all, not money.

That said, being an entitled spendthrift trustafarian isn’t much better. Smart wealthy people with a sense of perspective and proportion understand this balance. HNWIs like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett make a real effort to instill the idea of money’s real value in their kids, while not completely depriving them of the perks of wealth.

Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

This is a very insightful observation by diZerega. Great wealth does bring with it a great deal of personal freedom, and for a linear thinker it’s easy to translate that into the fallacious idea that great wealth is what created American liberty (lots of Libertarians confuse the terms “freedom” and “liberty”). With that mindset, preserving wealth and using it to keep score becomes the primary purpose of money

This adds another common thread between “secular libertarianism” and prosperity gospel: the old Protestant Work Ethic that provides a justification for denying people, even one’s own children, any real joy and happiness in life.

[off-topic, since I can’t always catch Mad Men on Sunday nights, I wouldn’t be averse to seeing you post Mad Men Tuesdays instead of Mondays, even if we lost the pleasant alliteration.]

Is it some sort of wierd competitiveness?

Yes, it’s often score-keeping. Hang out with i-bankers and they talk about it in exactly that way. The “biggest swinging dick” (in the charming parlance of The Street) is the one with the most money.

Really, there is such a thing as too much—I wouldn’t know what to do with billions of dollars.  Hell, even millions of dollars.  I really, really don’t get it.

Many first-generation millionaires and billionaires, even those who understand Amanda’s point about the service value of wealth, also don’t get it. Handling wealth in a way that truly adds to happiness requires a certain degree of maturity and perspective, which is why you see young celebrities, trustafarians, and miserable arrested-development cases like the Koch brothers or the hoarding Collyer brothers turn all that gold into manure.

It’s my main reason for wanting much higher, much more progressive taxes. This particular strain of humanity—the corporate pirate type, whose only goal is to get richer, never mind the consequences for himself or anyone—exists in order to compete against his/her peers. Nothing matters except that they have more money, or more status symbols, than the other rich people. It’s all relative to them. Tax the crap out of them, they’ll still behave that way. So if we tax the crap out of them, they’ll keep on doing it, and we can use the tax money to mitigate their worst excesses and have some left over so ordinary people can enjoy life.

#1 - from a certain perspective you could view noblesse oblige billionaires as worse than the outright-evil ones because they are the ones who keep the system functioning the way it is, by making it less terrible for the rest of us.

But I think it may be a misnomer to call these types libertarians, even in a derogatory sense.

Correct. Actual libertarians (as opposed to the capital-L types) call them Rotarian Socialists. The attitude isn’t too far off from what we see in the current crop of “Red” Chinese crony capitalists.

The thing abort rich people is, they can afford to have silly ideas. Not just have them, but raise them, nurture them and spread them around. If the ideas are self flattering and reinforce their assumptions, even better. Most people are willing to let rich folk do and say whatever they want, unchallenged, in the hope that some of that money will magically slip into their pockets, and so flatter these rich weirdos, further reinforcing and transmitting their strange ideas.

It’s my main reason for wanting much higher, much more progressive taxes.

It should be the reason for HNWIs, too. I don’t care how much money they have, and how big the walled estate or personal island they have—eventually the butcher’s bill will come due, in the form of angry mobs, authoritarian state-property governments, crappy infrastructure, and disease and war. Smart wealthy people (like Soros and Gates and Buffett) understand that part of enjoying one’s money is the freedom to do so safely and pleasantly outside the confines of the gilded-cage manor/castle.

I’ve heard it said (attributed to Bill Gates, but…) that it isn’t about the money.  Money is just how you keep score.  I’m not sure I buy that completely, but I do think there’s some truth in that statement.

Ted Turner: “Life is a game. Money is how we keep score.”  And I’ve seen enough variations on that to believe that for at least some of the very rich this is the case.  Money isn’t the means to an end, it’s an end in itself for them, which also explains why trickle-down Reaganomics was always full of crap: if money is the thing keeping score, why would you send it away to anyone else voluntarily?

For every billionaire/millionaire like Gates and his charitable work, or Paul Allen sinking his money into both charities and various high-tech investments on the bleeding edge (like Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), or even the ones who decide to have fun and buy a sports team or two, you’ve got a bunch who simply want to run up the tally board and not do anything with it.

It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail. (-Gore Vidal)

“This general worldview that’s suspicious of pleasure”

I have a theory on this…I think that one way of creating a really strong group identification among people is to require of all individuals in the group that they believe at least one obviously untrue thing, e.g., “sex/pleasure is bad”, “our group is better than their group”, “there’s no such thing as climate change”, “Jesus came back to life”, etc.  This is important for a couple of reasons:

(1) It creates a definite insider/outsider dynamic, so that people who make fun of the group or point out that the things it believes are obviously wrong become the enemy.  There will be a lot of these people because the beliefs are, well, obviously wrong.  This makes the group stronger as the individuals in the group are all fighting against a common enemy, and as it helps minimize interactions with nonbelievers who don’t enjoy discussions about obviously wrong things.

(2) In cases like “sex/pleasure is bad”, the longer individuals in the group, for example, abstain from sex, the more strongly they’ll adhere to their beliefs, because the prospect that they’ve been wrong all along and have missed out on all this great sex is just too horrifying to face up to.  Therefore, they’ll double down on the “sex/pleasure is bad” thing.  The same holds true if someone has died for the belief (e.g., that the Iraq war is worth fighting).  No one wants to believe the death was in vain, so they’ll double down on their belief even as evidence to the contrary piles higher and higher.  Nonbelievers will be seen as making light of the sacrifice, which feeds back into (1).

And in many cases, this is all rationalized as moral to the person who believes this because they view themselves as cogs in the same machine.  They just think they’re bigger, more important cogs.

“And they were sincere, these two women. They were drunk with conviction of the superiority of their class and of themselves. They had a sanction, in their own class-ethic, for every act they performed. As I drove away from Mrs. Pertonwaithe’s great house, I looked back at it, and I remembered Ernest’s expression that they were bound to the machine, but that they were so bound that they sat on top of it.”
- Jack London, “The Iron Heel”

It also partly explains why rightists seem better at politics than leftists, using the broadest definition of both rightist or leftist. Since to rightist people only exist to serve instiutions, they can devote ridiculous amounts of time to the rightist cause.

It’s part of it, but also the fact that they play to win. The right-wing never lets ideology get in the way of attaining power. In fact, that’s the reason why fascism (and American conservativism… which increasingly is harder to distinguish from the former) does not have an actual, coherent ideology if looked at independant of what is the best way to attain, or keep, power.

And that’s one failure of liberals. They let their ideology (that politics *should* be about compromise between factions in a society) blind them to the fact that under the current economic and political system such compromise is impossible. The working class and owning class exist in opposition and there is no reconciliation possible between them. Compromise can only exist in the classless society.

Gracchus at 10: The Ames article had some very interesting and true observations but it ultimately amounts to the form of American left literature I hate the most, the “woe is us because most Americans are evil rightists by nature therefore let us wallow in self-righteous indignation” genre. Most of the article also betrays, Ames’ cultural prejudices than anything else. I don’t play golf but I know people that do and they generally see golf as relaxing and meditative rather than dull, long and frustrating. Likewise, just because somebody likes watching sports doesn’t make a person spiteful. Would Mr. Ames complain that Europeans are filled with spite because they watch football?

  The observation that libertarians confuse making money with freedom isn’t particularly unique. Practically anybody of average intelligence should notice this because whenever a libertarian speaks or writes about liberty or freedom, there is bound to be talk about markets or capitalism or something near by. They don’t talk about things like LBGT rights because they can’t reduce LBGT rights to a money-making scheme. Libertarians only care for things that can be reduced to money-making schemes.

They don’t talk about things like LBGT rights because they can’t reduce LBGT rights to a money-making scheme.

Which shows their lack of imagination, because anybody who’s seen what modern pride parades have turned into have a direct example of how to ‘monetize’ these things (in my city you’re more likely to meet anarchist Pink Bloc protesters making trouble because of the capitalist takeover of Pride than homobigot protesters).

Not to mention the killing the marriage-industrial complex is poised to make.

“They don’t talk about things like LBGT rights because they can’t reduce LBGT rights to a money-making scheme. Libertarians only care for things that can be reduced to money-making schemes.”

What are “civil rights” compared to the thrill of obtaining more Gold-Pressed Latinum?...

BlackBloc at 22: First, many liberals do not want to compromise and would rather just achieve majorities through political means and implement liberal legislation. Unfortunately, the American political system, especially at the federal level, is counter-majoritarian in nature and was designed so that the rule by majority fiat is an impossibility. In parliamentary systems, compromise really doesn’t exist because the majority, even in a coalition government, can pass what it wants.

Both systems have merits and faults. The primary merit of the American system is that people in Congress, when the system functions, actually legislate. They modify bills sent to them by the President and can also initiate legislation on their own. Even if Obama didn’t pursue HCR, nothing in the American system would have prevented Congress from writing their own HCR bill and sending it to Obama for approval. In parliamentary systems, the legislature just ratifies what the executive sends them without much modification. The disadvantage of the American system and the advantage of parliamentary systems is that there are more veto points in the American system and that minority factions have more power. This makes it easier to kill legislation and generally harder to pass truly transformative legislation, whether liberal or conservative in nature.

  The second thing is that you can’t really reduce society to two classes, workers and owners. There are many people who are literally outside both groups and many more who are workers in some ways and owners in others.

  Third, why would compromise be even necessary in a classless society when everybody in your system should theoretically have the same values?

BlackBloc at 23, its not so much as a failure of imagination as many libertarians are probably more than a little homophobic with little use for gay people outside of lesbian porn aimed at striaght men. But yes, it shouldn’t take a genius to realize that legalizing same-sex marriage would lead to big bucks for the marriage business, all those tuxedos and weddings dresses, cakes and food, alcohol, photographers, musicians and djs, and wedding hall rentals translates into serious moolah. Even if many same-sex couples don’t go for elaborate weddings, enough will.

Can we stop with the No True Scotsman fallacy?  Every single self-identified libertarian is Not A Libertarian In The True Sense, whenever the word comes up. Why is it so fucking important that the word denote something good, that any and all useful mentions of it in reference to self-identified libertarians who exert complete control over its meaning aren’t considered libertarians?  If the people who founded the Cato Institute aren’t libertarians, there is no such thing.  A simpler solution: admit that libertarians are fuckwads, and give up trying to clean up the word for no good purpose.

The Ames article had some very interesting and true observations but it ultimately amounts to the form of American left literature I hate the most, the “woe is us because most Americans are evil rightists by nature therefore let us wallow in self-righteous indignation” genre.

I don’t see much about evil or even a right-wing political bent in his articles. I see a lot about variations of the classic 7 Deadly Sins as universal conditions for most humans, and those aren’t going away any time soon. Indignation is called for (he’s pretty self-critical, so I don’t know if the “self-righteous” part really applies). I also don’t know if his writing and that of the other Exiled types (e.g. Taibbi) can be categorised as “leftist”—in no small part because they don’t offer the sweeping solutions that you often see in actual leftist literature.

Most of the article also betrays, Ames’ cultural prejudices than anything else. I don’t play golf but I know people that do and they generally see golf as relaxing and meditative rather than dull, long and frustrating.

I know people like that, too, although I’m more in agreement with Ames personally. We all bring personal cultural prejudices to our writing, Amanda included. It can’t all be dry treatises and manifestos.

Likewise, just because somebody likes watching sports doesn’t make a person spiteful. Would Mr. Ames complain that Europeans are filled with spite because they watch football?

Having read his other stuff, I’m confident he’d probably make a related argument concerning the peasant mentality (see the 7 Deadly Sins, above), tribalism, and obsessions with sports teams.

Practically anybody of average intelligence should notice this because whenever a libertarian speaks or writes about liberty or freedom, there is bound to be talk about markets or capitalism or something near by.

True, but as Amanda notes they constantly bring it up not only because there’s a monetisation aspect, but because they truly believe that everything can be reduced to a cold (and preferably zero-sum) financial/economic transaction. LGBT rights, for example, breaks the comfortable evo-psych transactional model of “traditional marriage”, so not only don’t Libertarians talk about same-sex marriage, many are outspoken opponents of it.

I think it is so easy for the left:

to give rich right wingers too much credit [...].  A lot of liberals spin this story of how big money types like the Koches put together these ridiculous stories that they then feed to the plebes, who regurgitate stuff like signs demanding to see the birth certificate.  We see them as puppet masters whose ideas are so silly that they couldn’t believe it themselves.

because most of what we see speaking for the right are middlemen (and, more rarely, middlewomen).  Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, etc. are more opportunists than they are true believers, and they are all rich.  We tend to assume that those above them (financially and influencially) are more like them then they are like the deluded TeaBaggers.  Many of the other middlemen and women (and members of the TeaParty) are like Sarah Palin, a mixture of vague true belief and opportunism, that can never result in a coherent ideology.  It is hard to believe that this level of stupidity and lack of self-awareness can result in “success,” and so the left gravitates toward stripping away the ideology in our vision of people like the Kochs.

I consider this ceaseless service to an empty institution to be a function of religion.  So much of how religion works (in fact, I’d say, one of the reasons it exists at all) is that a small group will claim to be spokespeople for some invisible, unknowable thing that has power over not just life and death, but *eternal* life and death.  The spokespeople then have a lot of fear-based power over other believers, and they also have the authority to just make shit up.  ‘Cause hey, they have a special relationship with the invisible sky fairy and who are you to say they’re wrong?  Even though the Koch brothers and a lot of their followers may be formally secular, I think conservatives in general tend to be more habituated toward that kind of fear-based obedience.  That’s why, for instance, conservatives like to rally around a strong leader while the left is more likely to insist that its leaders actually do what their constituency wants them to do, even if it means losing an election or Balkanization.  It also has a lot to do with conservatives’ bitterness toward people who actually enjoy their lives without fear of divine retribution.

Can we stop with the No True Scotsman fallacy?  Every single self-identified libertarian is Not A Libertarian In The True Sense, whenever the word comes up.

Some are more thoughtful and internally consistent in their ideology than others. That said, I’ll agree that the vast majority of them, thoughtful ones included, basically have an infantile and myopic “mine-Mine-MINE” mentality at the core of their ideology.

“admit that libterarians are fuckwads”

Oh, alright.  You beat it out of me.

With the example of the Koch family, I understand that both extremes of child rearing of the wealthy can lead to the conservative worldview, over working and over indulging because it leads to a lack of understanding of work ethic.  Great article Amanda!

I don’t know that the Kochs dislike pleasure. Having read the article I think they get a lot pleasure out of thinking of themselves as heroes and telling stories of their battles and having a lot of flunkies around who are entirely dependent on them listen approvingly and tell them how piercing their insights are. Being able to think of yourself in glowing terms and buying what you need to do that is probably really pleasurable. Its a pity they are evil, corrupt nuts. Then there was the one who supposedly threw hugh hefner style parties. Not my idea of a good time but supposedly pleasure is the purpose of a party like that. 

It really goes to show though that all these institutes should be reclassified as public relations firms.

The article seems kind of odd in a way. They are constantly said to be in total control of everything but those are massive companies and its a massive political movement. How much micro managing is really possible?

Great article though

Gracchus at 28: I was using leftist in its broadest sense, as in any one on the Left-side of the political spectrum from liberal to anarcho-syndicalist. I don’t think that a person needs to offer sweeping solutions to be part of the left since most of the solutions have already been offered. Criticizing the right and thinking strategically on how to implement leftist ideas or even achieving elective victory can be part of the leftist literature. The problem with articles like Mr. Ames is that it fulfills neither of the above functions. What it does is provide an excuse for why liberals and leftists can never win in America and therefore just wallow in how awful it is.

  I would think that Mr. Ames is overestimating the effects of obsession on sports on the American psyche. In most of Europe, Latin America, and Africa; you have a lot of obsession about football (soccer) including obsession about specific teams without much of an effect on politics. Lots of people just like sports. Complaining that sports fandom distorts American politics because it leads to tribalism makes as much sense as criticizing science fiction fandom for distorting American politics because of tribalism. Tribalism is an over used cliche.

  Atheist, A Feminist at 29: Good point. The middle-people of rightism are the most likely to be people just in it for the money but sometimes I can’t tell. Rush Limbaugh is only in it for the money, and I can tell this by his “threat” to move to Costa Rica if healthcare is passed. Costa Rica is pretty left place even by European standards. It has no army, universal healthcare and other forms of social insurance, and is very ecologically consious. No way a true rightist would be happy there. I’m not sure if Glenn Beck is just bull shitting is audience. There are some serious sighns that he believes what he spouts.

The problem with articles like Mr. Ames is that it fulfills neither of the above functions. What it does is provide an excuse for why liberals and leftists can never win in America and therefore just wallow in how awful it is.

I’d disagree. Most of the articles, at least on ExiledOnline, basically have the same message: if progressives want to get some traction, they’re going to have to be as ruthless as these right-wing arseholes. In that they’re not so far off from the kind of thing BlackBloc talks about.

Complaining that sports fandom distorts American politics because it leads to tribalism makes as much sense as criticizing science fiction fandom for distorting American politics because of tribalism.

Look, I love SF fandom, but the mentality is nowhere near as tribal or aggro as sports fandom (and I say this as someone who likes both sports and SF), nor is it as mainstream in American life. I’ve heard about a lot more fist-fights over Yankees vs. Red Sox than I have over Trek vs. Wars.

I don’t know that the Kochs dislike pleasure.

Having read the article, I’d take it further than that. Charles Koch seems to be the dour one, but David Koch seems to take an interest in aesthetic pleasures and hedonism so long as that interest bolsters his ego and personal glory (although he only switched from playboy bachelor to patron of the arts with younger trophy wife late in life after a near-death experience).

There’s also an estranged younger brother named Freddie who’s gone the Scrooge McDuck “enjoy my art treasures in privacy” route.

The only universally true statement about Libertarians is that all of them are dumber than ravers.

In addition, they’ve given $100M to the Slate theatre in NY for opera and ballet, millions to cancer research (related to their own illness), milliions to MIT, U of Texas, Florida State, George Mason, the Smithsonian, the Museaum of Natural History (dino’s - who doesn’t like dino’s), etc.  Those bastards.

That’s all in the article. Re: George Mason U.:

In the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”

The article goes into the details of how this “selfless” philanthropic endeavour works mainly to benefit Koch Industries.

Re: Natural History Museum

The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD.” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum

After all, why should a science exhibit ask uncomfortable questions that might cast a bad light on a donor who makes his money from oil services?

Hey, I give to many of the same places.  Makes me proud.

The Kochs would call you a sucker, since your name isn’t over the door and since your multi-billion dollar company isn’t benefiting.

Oh I think Charles gets a lot of secret pleasure out of the whole thing. I think I read near the end that Charles got rid of one of the top Cato flunkies because he didn’t kiss ass well enough and in the meantime he found someone better. Ah screw it, here’s the bit

Fink, with his many titles, has become the central nervous system of the Kochtopus. He appears to have supplanted Ed Crane, the head of the Cato Institute, as the brothers’ main political lieutenant. Though David remains on the board at Cato, Charles Koch has fallen out with Crane. Associates suggested to me that Crane had been insufficiently respectful of Charles’s management philosophy, which he distilled into a book called “The Science of Success,”

Can you imagine the hissy fit charles threw when he was not accorded the displays of worship he has become accustomed to.

Incidentally the reviews on amazon of The Science of Success are unintentional comedy gold

And before you start whinging about that bad ol’ puppetmaster Soros, Libertarian, they’ve covered that in the article, too:

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry.

The point being that Soros doesn’t hide behind phoney-baloney astroturf orgs like FreedomWorks, or pseudo-independent think tanks and bought-and-paid-for academic institutes.

I’d disagree somewhat with Vachon that the contributions aren’t in the service of Soros’s own economic interests—an open society and liberal is generally good for a financier, or at least one who’s seen first-hand what happens to financiers who are out of government favour in a closed society.

I don’t know that the Kochs dislike pleasure. Having read the article I think they get a lot pleasure out of thinking of themselves as heroes and telling stories of their battles and having a lot of flunkies around who are entirely dependent on them listen approvingly and tell them how piercing their insights are.

Then perhaps you need another word besides “pleasure” to comprehend what I’m talking about.  I get a lot out of what I do, as well, but I don’t consider it my fun play time.  Living life in a deeper, more fulfilling way means getting authentic pleasures, not just winning the most toys.  Pleasures like enjoying the moment, bonding with others, being idle, laughing, having sex, enjoying beauty for its own sake, goofing off.  All frowned upon by the right to one degree or another.  Many liberals I know tend to get sucked into the work-a-holic mentality—-I’m something of a work-a-holic myself—-but almost everyone I know who is like that still thinks that spending time nurturing your soul is incredibly important.

Oh I think Charles gets a lot of secret pleasure out of the whole thing. I think I read near the end that Charles got rid of one of the top Cato flunkies because he didn’t kiss ass well enough and in the meantime he found someone better.

True in general, but most people don’t classify the power-hungry psychopath’s pleasure as a healthy form of happiness.

The article has all sorts of great moments like that. The funniest was the bit about Koch Industries taking exception to government opposition to air pollution because (I kid you not) smog can reduce the general incidence of skin cancer.

The worst part, easily, about writing about libertarians is that self-identified ones think you’re talking about them and they have to butt in.  Because ego-feeding is the main and often sole source of satisfaction.  It’s just doubly pathetic when there’s not even a good reason to be egotistical, like our troll here.  At least Koch can say, “Hey, I’m a billionaire whose life was saved in a freakish way,” which is evidence of something in the right light.  But wingnut trolls?  I got nothing.  It’s just sad.

if money is the thing keeping score, why would you send it away to anyone else voluntarily?

Well, we could make the score based solely on money in, rather than the balance sheet at the end of the quarter/year/lifetime, but that interferes with demonizing the poor and unworthy for spending beyond what they “deserve.”

And unfortunately, our economy was created with the premise that people need to work in order to survive well, and has arranged itself to take full advantage thereof, and is therefore dependent on it—-jobs tend to suck, so it would take a massive restructuring on many levels to get to a point where most people have access to work they would willingly continue if their livelihood didn’t depend on it. Shorter hours, nicer work environments, serious extra benefits for certain jobs that will suck no matter what (or a good means of sharing them between everybody), some change in what services are common (I suspect the fast-food industry would collapse, honestly) . . .

But no, every selfish and self-deluded douchebag with an ego and a vote is convinced that he’ll be one of the illustrious billionaires, and votes to plush up his eventual golden ticket as much as possible at the expense of all the people he’s gonna sprout financial wings and soar away from eventually . . . not caring that he’s fertilizing that pie in the sky by shitting on the financial ground he stands on.

George Mason is where Watler Willaims teaches.  He was at the CATO seminar I went to back in about 1982.  Great guy. Tall.  Likes a beer or two.  Me too.

Ah, the John M Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics. What more trustworthy scholar is there that’s funded by both an arms and chemical combine and by an oil services corporation? But he is tall and likes a beer.

I know there are gleefully stupid Libertarians out there, but I have to invoke Poe’s Law. I mean, really:

The seminar was at Dartmouth.  Did you know they have free soft ice cream cones in the cafeteria?  Love that place.

Yet another Libertarian who doesn’t know what TANSTAAL means. Don’t any of you guys read Heinlein anymore?

“The seminar was at Dartmouth.  Did you know they have free soft ice cream cones in the cafeteria?  Love that place.”

Free ice cream cones?  Son, haven’t you heard there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch?

By rights, all libertarians should inhabit a world of coin-operated elevators, stairs, toilets, toll-roads, toll-streets, toll-driveways, water faucets, sewers, electricity (only stays on for 15mins and then requires another coin), internet access, TV, sexual services, and oxygen (assuming some enterprising libertarian can figure out how to do it).  It’s time you moochers were made to understand that nothing in life is free.

I think Amanda should charge you just to share your awesome self with the rest of us…

Lib, given that you “admire” what are a group of what are bad people, I really have to call your moral judgment into question, something which afflicts most people I come across who identify themselves as “libertarian,” which is one reason I don’t take that belief system seriously.

Whenever republicans start going about ~mAh cHARItY~ I can never take it seriously because I have no idea how much of it is awful shit like this (and how much of it is just ineffectual and useless).

Gracchus at 37: I agree that liberals and progressives need to start politicking better and get the word out more effectively. Not sure if this means that we have to be as ruthless as righitsts because the overall effect might be our overall psych and we could suffer the same problems that the rightists suffer from.

Then perhaps you need another word besides “pleasure” to comprehend what I’m talking about.  I get a lot out of what I do, as well, but I don’t consider it my fun play time.

It wasn’t a swipe at you personally. I don’t think the pleasure is about having the most toys. Its about being at the top and having people look up to you and worship which brings the toys with it. That’s kind of real. Not good or healthy and definitely perverse but real. Its a pity they didn’t just learn to LARP.

You listed a bunch of healthy ways and I think Martha Nussbaum uses the word eudaimonia to signify the kind of happiness you are talking about. The funny lingo was picked to get away from the idea of happiness as pleasure which is in the neighborhood of sensation and often people treat it as non cognitive.

I’d be happy to buy you a beer too.

Careful, MikeEss, the beer would only seem to be free. I also suspect that, given the likely conversation, the actual price would be way too high.

And I earned it all myself.

Did orogeny’s son just pop over from this thread?

That you can do anything in a SOCIETY “all by yourself” is a myth.  That you’ve bought the myth so much that you believe repeating it will go unchallenged here, of all places, makes you deluded and undermines everything else you may try to convince us of.

The reason taxes are superior to charity is because that way rich people can’t pick and choose who is worthy to receive aid. Taxes are also a relatively anonymous way to do it, which means less overall humiliation. Really, that’s why people are in favor of things like drug testing to get welfare. Because to them, there isn’t sufficient humiliation involved in receiving welfare, so they have to pile it on.

I hope I get to live long enough to see the day Libertarian (or a descendant of his) regrets which side he picked in the class war.

Libertarian medical services: “If you wish to continue this medical intervention, please deposit another $175 for 5-more minutes…”

Libertarian fire fighting:  “I’m sorry sir, I realize your house is burning, but you need to understand that we haven’t got the results of your credit check yet.  I’m sure we can start knocking that fire out in the next half-hour or so, if your credit checks out okay…”

Libertarian police:  “I know you paid to place the 911 call, sir, but that only covers basic misdemeanors.  If you want us to respond to a felony, you’ll have to buy our ‘911 Plus’ package, which covers one felony.  Each additional felony has a separate cost.  If you have more than five felonies to report, you can purchase our ‘911 Get Five Felonies for the Price of Four’ and get a discount…”

While there’s something to be said for the ways in which these guys are true believers, it’s important to recognize that their massive power, which one would think would make them super-duper well-informed, actually serves to make them dumber. Power makes you stupid. When a powerful figure does or says something brain-meltingly moronic, it’s likely because they really are that stupid.

And I earned it all myself.

Then why are you so impressed with the Kochs? They’re a bunch of kids who inherited a business from their father.

In any case, I put very little stock in libertarians’ claims of success. Those claimants tend to be middle-manager types making a decent but by no means impressive living and the like. In my life I’ve met exactly 1 libertarian who started a business. The rest consider the burdens of small business retail and management to be beneath them.

I had help from lots of people, most of whom I’ve thanked in many ways.

If you live in America, you’ve had help from far more than “lots,” and since your entire philosophy resists giving back to all of those people (or their descendants since many of them are already dead) in a collective way, you aren’t doing a terrific job thanking us.

Let’s look at research for an example of why private interests aren’t 100% awesome. Corporate research is all well and good, but corporations are out to make a profit. That’s not a horrible thing, it just means that all the research they do needs to eventually make them money. So that precludes a lot of basic research. Research that is government funded and done by public universities or government agencies needs to show results in the form of overall improvement of public welfare and in peer-reviewed publications. That leaves much more room for different types of work. If we didn’t have the government working on something like solitary pollinators, nobody would be doing it. It’s not something that will turn a profit in ~10 years and since it doesn’t involve photogenic children charities couldn’t give less of a shit. But it’s still a valuable project because our crops are dependent upon pollinators.

He’s playing hater gonna hate. He isn’t actually going to think about anything you say to him.

I just like to say that because it drives you guys nuts.

Why do you assume that? The only thing that drives us nuts is your lame attempt to backpedal.

I wouldn’t be tempted to join your beer group because I’ve already talked to libertarians who show a bit more intelligence and knowledge than you’ve demonstrated here. But mainly because any money I saved on beer would be spent on Tylenol, which I’d need after repeatedly banging my head on the pub table in despair while talking politics with you.

Libertarian: It WOULD come at a price.  That being - you might have to reasses your preconceptions about “all libertarians.” Most likely you and Mike and maybe even Amanda would come away thinking I was just another guy - that’s how my many liberal friends view me - I live just across the GWB 20 minutes from NY - most of the people I know and hang with are liberals.  Somehow, it works.

While it’s quite lovely that Some Of Your Best Friends Are Liberals, I don’t think you’re hurdling a particularly high bar when you claim that you can hang out with human beings who don’t contain raging fonts of solipsistic psychopathy within a genial exterior like you do without tipping them off.

(Also, is there a libertarian bingo square for the “you guys are intolerant and close-minded! if only you knew the power of the Dark Side^W^WNon-Aggression Principle!” thing? If not, there really should be. It’s amazing. We’re here, on the Internet, of all places, and this guy’s acting like none of us have ever encountered libertarians before.)

MikeEss: Libertarian medical services: “If you wish to continue this medical intervention, please deposit another $175 for 5-more minutes…”

Have you ever read Jennifer Government?

Tyro: In my life I’ve met exactly 1 libertarian who started a business. The rest consider the burdens of small business retail and management to be beneath them.

Well, yeah. Everyone knows that real libertarians own transcontinental railroads and magic metal corporations.

most of the people I know and hang with are liberals.  Somehow, it works.

I’d venture to say that most of us have a friend or family member or two we know from college or grew up with who is fun and have had a lot of close shared experiences with who never the less has aged into kind of a douche. Not being big drama queens, we don’t make a big to-do about their douchiness and delusions they’ve picked up along the way, but we know they’re there.

The thing about libertarians is that the success they claim to have is based on an economy that is in so many ways anti-libertarian. Capital markets were regulated to keep companies honest. There’s a large market of active consumers available because there’s a thriving middle class. The universities the Kochs attended exist because of the land grant system and government funding for research, etc.

*nod* supporting asshole political views makes one an asshole. There’s no “I’m a nice guy” escape from that.

That you see this on the internet makes a whole lot of sense. There’s a lot of people who say that the personality you have on the internet doesn’t matter, because it’s not real. In reality, that personality you have on the internet IS your real personality, it’s just that for a variety of reasons, it’s sometimes hidden in real life.

“I just like to say that because it drives you guys nuts.”

Thanks for admitting you’re a troll.

I imagine we all have friends of different political persuasions. Usually, these people are socially adept enough not to talk politics over a beer. At least, this is true of my generation. Who knows how much social ineptitude the internet has fostered among the younger folks.

“Have you ever read Jennifer Government?”

...no, but I looked it up and it seems like my kind of book…

MikeEss, I was strongly reminded of this bit:

“Nine-eleven Emergency, how can I help you?”

“I need an ambulance. Quickly, a girl has been shot at the Chadstone Wal-Mart mall.”

“Certainly, sir. Can you tell me the girl’s name?”

“Hayley. Hayley something. Please, come straight away.”

“Sir, I need to know if the victim is part of our register,” the operator said. “If she’s one of our clients, we’ll be there within a few minutes. Otherwise I’m happy to recommend—”

“I need an ambulance!” he shouted, and it was only when water splashed on his hand that he realized he had started to cry. “I’ll pay for it, I don’t care, just come!”

“Do you have a credit card, sir?”

“Yes! Send someone now!”

“As soon as I confirm your ability to pay, sir. This will only take a few seconds.”

On the other hand, Heinlein did write about people having to pay for their own air in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, if I recall correctly. I think they’d space people who fell behind on their payments. I don’t think it was an attempt at irony or anything like that.

I have reason to be acquainted with several multi-level marketing (MLM) participants.  Although they tie it up in feel-good “do good by doing well” speech, it’s really all about clawing their way to the big-boys club.  Most of them don’t realize (or are willing to acknowledge) that it’ll never, ever happen, because most of the big boys’ income comes from places other than MLM.  It’s also wrapped up in Calvinism - work really really hard now and perhaps one day you’ll have your reward. And if you don’t get your reward, then you just didn’t work hard enough, now did you? 

Entomologista #58, that’s exactly right.  The ones I know can be very nice people and see themselves as charitable, but it’s all on their terms and they want to determine who is “worthy”.  This is one of the strongest arguments for government that I can think of - to lessen the burden of bowing and scraping from the already humiliating process of having to ask for help.

“As soon as I confirm your ability to pay, sir. This will only take a few seconds.”

grendelkhan, the sad thing is some libertarian (and/or teabagger) will read that and think, “Hey! That’s a good idea!”...

Okay, I give up. I will stop thinking “deluded twit” when I see the word “libertarian” and instead think “evil fsckwad”.

And if you’ve ever been through the insurance/finance check as part of emergency-room triage, you know we already have a fair approximation of a libertarian health care system…

Jennifer Government was good, but Company by the same author was *awesome*.

Synopsis:

At Zephyr Holdings, no one has ever seen the CEO in person. The beautiful receptionist is paid twice as much as anybody else, but does no apparent work. The sales reps use relationship self-help books as sales manuals, and one is on the warpath because of a missing mid-morning donut. In other words, it’s an ordinary big company.

This is the book that asks the questions: When is physical violence an appropriate response to management policy? Why is that one reserved parking space always empty? Taking an extra donut from the team’s basket: is that a sign of a motivated go-getter, or a sociopath? And this sea of incompetence and insanity they call a workplace: it can’t really be that way by accident, can it?

Paul Allen sinking his money into both charities and various high-tech investments on the bleeding edge (like Scaled Composites and SpaceShipOne), or even the ones who decide to have fun and buy a sports team or two

Interestingly enough, in addition to his other ventures, Paul Allen DOES own a few professional sports teams - the Seattle Seahawks (NFL), the Portland Trailblazers (NBA), and the Seattle Sounders FC (MLS).

I’d disagree somewhat with Vachon that the contributions aren’t in the service of Soros’s own economic interests—an open society and liberal is generally good for a financier, or at least one who’s seen first-hand what happens to financiers who are out of government favour in a closed society.

I think the difference is that Koch giving is targetted in such a way that will be directly beneficial to their interests, whereas Soros giving is a lot more indirect in its how it personally benefits him.

Soros could buy government favor a lot cheaper than he can buy an open society.

“I just like to say that because it drives you guys nuts.”

Trolling defined.

This is the essence of libertarianism: When they’re not breaking their arms patting themselves on their backs in a neverending bukkake shower of Ayn Rand’s awesome-sauce, they spent their time baiting progressives as a form of entertainment / mild punishment for not seeing things their way.  Never inventing new was to be vindictive, self-abeorbed & selfish, just endlessly repeating old ones.

The common thread between secular libertarianism and the more whole cloth Christian libertarianism is ... the wealthy on top ...

This is Bizzaro Christianity. In real Christianity, “the first shall be last and the last will be first” as the rich men keep slamming their camels against the eye of a sewing needle.  If you want eternal life, Jesus said, give up all your earthly possessions, and follow Him.

Matthew 19

16And someone came to Him and said, “Teacher, what good thing shall I do that I may obtain eternal life?” 17And He said to him, “Why are you asking Me about what is good? There is only One who is good; but if you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” 18Then he said to Him, “Which ones?” And Jesus said, “YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT MURDER; YOU SHALL NOT COMMIT ADULTERY; YOU SHALL NOT STEAL; YOU SHALL NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS; 19HONOR YOUR FATHER AND MOTHER; and YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.” 20The young man said to Him, “All these things I have kept; what am I still lacking?” 21Jesus said to him, “If you wish to be complete, go and sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” 22But when the young man heard this statement, he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.

    23And Jesus said to His disciples, “Truly I say to you, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. 24“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” 25When the disciples heard this, they were very astonished and said, “Then who can be saved?” 26And looking at them Jesus said to them, “With people this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”

The Disciples’ Reward

    27Then Peter said to Him, “Behold, we have left everything and followed You; what then will there be for us?” 28And Jesus said to them, “Truly I say to you, that you who have followed Me, in the regeneration when the Son of Man will sit on His glorious throne, you also shall sit upon twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. 29“And everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or farms for My name’s sake, will receive many times as much, and will inherit eternal life. 30“But many who are first will be last; and the last, first.

Have you ever read Jennifer Government?

Try ThigMoo instead.

I think the difference is that Koch giving is targetted in such a way that will be directly beneficial to their interests, whereas Soros giving is a lot more indirect in its how it personally benefits him.

The difference is even more fundamental: the Koch family concept of an open market (and the society that enables it) is ultimately one where only incumbents and cronies like themselves benefit; the Soros concept of an open market (and the society that enables it) is ultimately one where Soros and anyone else can benefit. Soros benefits handsomely from the open society he promotes, but he’s not a greedpig about it.

That a self-professed libertarian would donate to Cato and not to OSI tells us a lot about that person’s commitment to real liberty, and a lot about his personal greed and selfishness (which, with all due respect to fans of Gordon Gecko and Ayn Rand, are not good things). As Paul notes:

Soros could buy government favor a lot cheaper than he can buy an open society.

The Koch brothers, meanwhile, buy both government favour (to the tune of $100s of millions in contracts, which implies serious lobbying) and, through their wingnut welfare, the sham version of an open society that will allow them to perpetuate their Rotarian Socialism. Fortunately for them, they have plenty of Teabaggers and Libertarians and other suckers who believe that they’ll somehow be allowed into the club.

Free ice cream cones?  Son, haven’t you heard there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch?

That was like free fish in a community barrel. Laughing still.

There’s also an estranged younger brother named Freddie who’s gone the Scrooge McDuck “enjoy my art treasures in privacy” route.

You’ve got it backwards… Fred Koch is actually the oldest brother (b. 1933), not the youngest.  The father was also named Fred Koch.  The youngest brother is William Koch.  Charles and David are the middle two brothers.  The three youngest all attended MIT and pursued chemical engineering degrees, but Fred, the oldest Koch brother went to Harvard and pursued a life in the arts, never caring to get involved in the family business.  After the elder Fred Koch passed away in 1967, legal battles ensued between the brothers which pitted Fred and William against Charles and David, with J. Marshall Howard II (the ancient oil man who married Anna Nicole Smith) getting entangled in the dispute as well.  In the end, Charles and David emerged as the principal owners of Koch Industries, the largest private company in America, and will likely remain a private company for a long time to come, as Charles Koch has stated repeatedly that it would have to b over his dead body for Koch Industries to ever go public.  That said, neither Fred nor William are strapped for cash, and while their wealth might not match their brothers, the two lesser known brothers are still fairly wealthy people.  The younger Fred Koch is a collector who once owned Sutton Place, where Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn met, and is a long serving board member of the Met in NYC.  William Koch is a businessman with his own energy sector ventures and a yachting afficianado who won the 1992 America’s Cup.  He is also a collector, and is currently embroiled in litigation over vintage bottles of wine that he purchased which were purportedly owned by Thomas Jefferson but he now believes are fraudulent.

There’s one other family-owned company in America which seems to share that sentiment - Mars, Inc. (the chocolate people), which has always been a private company.  The three Mars children who currently own the company are among the 50 wealthiest people in the world, each worth $9 Billion.  Unlike the Koch brothers, they are notoriously private people who refuse to ever give media interviews, and the company’s main headquarters doesn’t contain any external signage with the name “Mars”.  Together with 18 other American billionaire families, they have spent more than $500 Million lobbying Congress in the past 15 years in efforts to permanently eliminate the estate tax.  Truly greedy people.

As someone stated above, the impression that the wealthy wingnut set employs cynicism and doesn’t really believe their own BS is mainly embodied by wealthy media wingnuts, as opposed to wealthy corporate magnates and their heirs, who are generally far wealthier than rich media wingnuts, even those at the top like Limbaugh whose personal net worth is well into 9 figures.  Unlike the insanely wealthy corporate wingnuts, media wingnuts didn’t make their money by producing any sort of tangible good but rather by becoming proficient propagandists who could attract large wingnut audiences.  And for the most part, while folks like Limbaugh and Beck certainly didn’t grow up poor, they weren’t brought up by ultra-wealthy old money parents.  Point being, wealthy media wingnuts can mostly be classified as nouveau riche, whereas a good chunk of the corporate wealthy - particularly the ones who you don’t see too much - grew up in extremely wealthy households.

existing hierarchies that put the wealthy on top (and men on top of women, and whites on top of non-white people) are inviolable

There’s one more angle to be added, I think.  Socially conservative economic libertarians in modern society actually love the cases where women, minorities, and people from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed, tempered by the successful person’s willingness to publicly identify with the tribe.  Thus the prominence of Palin, Steele, Fiorina, Bachman, Angle, etc.  Because those exceptions allow the right-libertarians to ignore the typical cases.  Start pointing out systemic issues like women being underpaid for equivalent work and they reply, there’s no glass ceiling, look at Carly!  Tell them that white felons are more likely to get job interviews than African-Americans with no record and they’ll say racial discrimination is no barrier - look at Michael! 

The exceptions are (in their minds) demonstrating that the hierarchies are natural outcomes of people’s inherent natures rather than a product of a hierarchy-reinforcing system.

Libertarian:

Do explain to me where the fun in trolling like that lies, given that most of us are mostly reacting to how hopelessly lame you are.

there’s no glass ceiling, look at Carly!

Of course, Carly at Hewlett-Packard was hopelessly incompetent and pissed off a huge swath of old-line employees. In that regard, she reminds me a fair bit of Sarah Palin…

Good lord, don’t tell me we’re still on liking beer as the prime measure of human worth.  Didn’t we get tired of that after eight years of Bush?

That’s one of the big reasons I can never take libertarians seriously: they set such low standards for their own.  He must be a good professor!  He’s TALL!

The far more popular strain of libertarianism is the Christian libertarianism that you’re seeing in the actual Tea Party-backed candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and Ken Buck.  These people believe the markets are sacrosanct, pollution is fine, but that the government does have a duty to enforce social hierarchies by oppressing women, gays, non-Christians, basically anyone who is considered uppity for demanding equality. 

Welcome to the new Zimbabwe!

the cases where women, minorities, and people from disadvantaged backgrounds succeed, tempered by the successful person’s willingness to publicly identify with the tribe.  Thus the prominence of Palin, Steele, Fiorina, Bachman, Angle, etc.

I realize these are separate groups, but for a moment I flashed on a Carly Fiorina who over came the stigma of a law professor/Court of Appeals judge dad and a Stanford degree to succeed at AT&T;the old fashioned way—she became an upper exec’s girlfriend. She dumped her college sweetheart husband and married Frank within the year. Frank retired early to help manage her career.

(Frank went to the lengths of getting a concealed weapons permit to act as her bodyguard once Carly took the job as CEO of HP.)

Don’t any of you guys read Heinlein anymore?

Thanks, Gracchus. Now I have to clean all this tea off the computer monitor.

Don’t any of you guys read Heinlein anymore?

I’m too busy planning invasions, butchering hogs, writing sonnets, pitching manure, comforting the dying, and cooking tasty meals. Who has time to read any more?

JohnMcKay, I don’t have all day to tell you what you’ve missed, but I do know you miss this:

“Are there not workhouses?”

JohnMcCay, basically every awful belief you have and every scandal you get excised about on a daily basis exists because you were specifically propagandized to do so by a select group of think tanks and extremist right wing organizations, funded by a bunch of billionaires who want you to get your undies in a bunch over something. And that’s basically it.

If libertarians were able to reproduce, they would frighten their tots into good behavior with threats of turning George Soros loose on them.

”...basically every awful belief you have and every scandal you get excised about on a daily basis exists because you were specifically propagandized to do so by a select group of think tanks and extremist right wing organizations, funded by a bunch of billionaires who want you to get your undies in a bunch over something.”

Mission accomplished!...

Strictly speaking, Heinlein’s politics were heavily dependent on the woman he was having sex with. If Virginia Heinlein had been a social democrat rather than a right wing libertarian, the world would be a very different place. But I digress.

Regarding libertarians, always keep in mind that they are nowhere near a working electoral majority. If we had a proportional voting or instant runoff system they could run separate campaigns but that’s not what we’ve got. Even in the current system they could run a more significant third party effort but in practice that would hurt the Republicans too much. As a practical matter you have to choose between Democrats and Republicans, which in the libertarian case means choosing low taxes and deregulation versus civil liberties, especially for women and minorities. And time after time, libertarians have chosen to be the junior partner to the Christian Right and the racist right rather than support civil liberties. Telling women, blacks and gays to fuck off may just be business rather than ideology but the outcome is the same. The whole rebel pose is to hide the humiliating truth that libertarians are functionally no different from traditional conservatives and accept playing Robin to the mainstream Republican Batman. They fancy themselves revolutionaries but are more akin to court eunuchs.

Any real libertarian (and I know I’m skirting close to the No True Scotsman fallacy here) would be anti-corporation.  Why?  Because one of the biggest government subsidies out there is limited liability.  It’s a legal construct that before the 19th century existed nowhere, and is the foundation of modern capitalism.  It’s entirely unnatural and completely dependent on state support.

I do know of one or two libertarians that are anti-corporation on just that basis.  They call themselves left libertarians though.

We got to talking about their portrayal of Conrad Hilton, which actually softened the real life man’s uglier, harder edges, if you can believe it.  And Marc said that, in his eyes, Paris Hilton is by far the better human being.  After all, she knows what money is *for*, which is in service of living.  The rich, he argued, are better off being the idle rich than getting sucked into the crazed business of making more and more money just to do it.

One of the greater sins of the Scrooge McDuck dour puritan occasionally-fascist-friendly moneybags great-granddad types is that they make their worthless descendants look like sensible people by contrast.  This can amount to a huge peril.  Only a few quick changes (the two big ones would be of gender and generation) would suffice to transform George Bush into Paris Hilton, were there any magician extant capable of performing that feat.  Both the Bush daughters resemble Paris Hilton personally and biographically, and I don’t think that’s an accident.

Sympathy with Paris Hilton is misplaced.  She is her great-granddad’s great-grandkid through and through.  Which is no surprise, considering the rarefied environment in which she has been brought up.  One might prefer to sample apéritifs with Paris rather than drink blood with Conrad, but it might be an even better idea to give them both a wide berth.  (My $0.02.  Though I do agree that Dubya’s biggest flaw was that he wasn’t idle enough.)

Strictly speaking, Heinlein’s politics were heavily dependent on the woman he was having sex with.

And you guys thought MDPGs were useless!

@106

So, your response to this:

JohnMcCay, basically every awful belief you have and every scandal you get excised about on a daily basis exists because you were specifically propagandized to do so by a select group of think tanks and extremist right wing organizations, funded by a bunch of billionaires who want you to get your undies in a bunch over something. And that’s basically it.

is “that isn’t an original thought”?

I mean, I think that everyone with any common sense at all would realize what a deluded hack you are, but the fact that not only do you believe this as well but choose to brag about it is…well…interesting to day the least.

*say

I’m in the chemicals industry and know the Koch story well from a recent hire who had interviewed there and ended up reading Charles Koch’s “Science of Success”.  There was a series of articles on Daily Kos about 5 years ago that outlined how the Koch’s routinely engaged in crime in order to “make” more money.  This article too mentions quite a few of those crimes: stealing oil, dumping oil and benzene into public waters, and failing to spend adequately on safety and getting civilians killed.

Amazing how all of their “libertarian” ideals are really just a cover for being highly-paid criminals.

@Comment #104: Katherine on 08/24 at 03:34 AM

Any real libertarian (and I know I’m skirting close to the No True Scotsman fallacy here) would be anti-corporation.  Why?  Because one of the biggest government subsidies out there is limited liability.  It’s a legal construct that before the 19th century existed nowhere, and is the foundation of modern capitalism.  It’s entirely unnatural and completely dependent on state support.

I do know of one or two libertarians that are anti-corporation on just that basis.  They call themselves left libertarians though.

As far as I’m concerned people get no points for having an intellectually consistent form of insanity. Is my belief that I am being stalked by wee murderous elves, made more acceptable if I also smash any garden gnomes that I happen upon, just to be sure? To me the answer is far from clear.

@Comment #70: Tyro on 08/23 at 02:20 PM

The thing about libertarians is that the success they claim to have is based on an economy that is in so many ways anti-libertarian. Capital markets were regulated to keep companies honest. There’s a large market of active consumers available because there’s a thriving middle class. The universities the Kochs attended exist because of the land grant system and government funding for research, etc.

There’s an even easier point: without the massive and enormously expensive government program we call “The Internet”, they wouldn’t be able to tell you anything about how the government should be drowned in a bathtub, etc.