Soros-Koch Team Up

File under: Anything can happen inside the Beltway.

I just got an email invitation to a Cato Institute book forum being held in Washington D.C. later  this week.

Unfortunately, I am on the West Coast, so I won't be attending. But get a load of this, the forum is being held in conjunction with the recent release of F.A. Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty -The Definitive Edition  edited by Ronald Hamowy, and George Soros is a featured speaker.

Cato, of course, is heavily funded by the Koch brothers. Soros is a heavy funder of Common Cause, which had its troops earlier this year in Palm Desert protesting a Koch brothers conference.

Let's see how Common Cause chairman Robert Reich handles this, since he has correctly written:

The final truth is as income and wealth have risen to the top, so has political power. The reason all of this is proving so difficult to get across is the super-rich, such as the Koch brothers, have been using their billions to corrupt politics, hoodwink the public, and enlarge and entrench their outsized fortunes. They’re bankrolling Republicans who are mounting showdowns and threatening shutdowns...

Will Reich now admit that he was more correct than he realized and that when it comes to the inside the Beltway game, it is indeed the super-rich who use political power against the rest of us and that Soros and Koch are part of that game? And will Cato supporters be furiously jotting down notes of the words of wisdom from Soros on Hayek? Since, Soros blames many of the world's problems on the failures inherent in what he characterizes as market fundamentalism. According to Soros, market fundamentalism with its assumption that markets will correct themselves with no need for government intervention in financial affairs has been "some kind of an ideological excess" and is the direct cause of the recent financial crisis.

This, of course, flies in the face of Hayek's thinking. It should be noted that Hayek received the Nobel Prize for his theory of how the business cycle is caused by central bank manipulation of money and credit, and that this has little to do with free markets, fundamental or otherwise. Bottom line if Soros wasn't a fellow travelling oligarch, he would have never gotten in to this show, Reich wasn't invited, Joseph Stiglitz wasn't invited, Paul Krugman wasn't invited. It's not about debate, its about power.