Monday, March 5, 2012

What It Takes to Get Big Support from the Koch Brothers

How embarrassing for the Koch brothers.

Even Paul Krugman gets to comment with some on the money points about the Koch-Cato  power opera and the kinds of people the Kochs use as tools:
Via Brad DeLong, I see that the Kochs are trying to take over Cato, which they view as insufficiently hackish.

They must have high standards in this regard; after all, Cato is, among other things, a place that had something called the Project on Social Security Privatization, which it renamed the Project on Social Security Choice when it turned out that “privatization” polled badly — and tried to purge its records, to make it look as if they had never used the word privatization.

But what really struck me was that among the people the Kochs have tried to place on the board is John Hinderaker of Powerline. Hinderaker is best known for this:
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
But what I remember best is his sneering dismissal of any suggestion that there might be a housing bubble, or that falling home prices would do any economic damage.

So now we know what it takes to get big support from the Kochs.

8 comments:

  1. Words cannot express how much I am enjoying this. I regret that courts move so slowly and are rarely televised. I would also love to see Lew Rockwell make a legal bid for Rothbard's stolen shares, I mean, as long as we're fighting about who owns what shares...

    Sadly, I think Lew Rockwell is too mature to get down in the mud and wrestle with these people, but what a fun spectacle it would be.

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  2. "Sadly, I think Lew Rockwell is too mature to get down in the mud and wrestle with these people, but what a fun spectacle it would be."

    What this does is vindicate the noble actions of Lew Rockwell in founding the Mises Institute with Murray Rothbard, and in Lew's prudent strategy of not being largely beholden to a major donor.

    Lew Rockwell is the anti-Ed Crane, or rather Crane is the anti-Rockwell. Think about it . . . Crane is the antithesis of everything that Rockwell is. Rockwell is disciplined in editing and publishing LRC 6 times a week for years on end, whereas Crane can't stick with a project. Rockwell is an intellectual and economist who, despite not having formal economic training takes to heart Mises admonition that the modern man must understand economics. Crane has no intellectual output to speak of. Finally, Rockwell is a class-act with a personal demeanor suitable to fundraising and more importanly to friendship, whereas, Crane is just simply miserable.

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  3. You know, as much as the Koch's suck and airing their dirty laundry is good fun, must we suffer through Krugman's bs?? This country is truly falling apart...

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  4. Paul Krugman really shouldn't be commenting on anyone's "sneering dismissal of any suggestion that there might be a housing bubble" ...

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  5. I plead with Lew to demand his day in court. Murray Rothbard was factually and blatantly purged from CATO in an illegal manner.

    Is not then every dilution and trickery in the ownership of CATO which followed his purging void?

    Why is surrender and refusal to demand what is right before the law called being "too mature?" What kind of talk is that?

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  6. Join today and be a fake Libertarian for the CATO Institute

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  7. If the Kochs think Bush was a genius and a brilliant artist of ideas, what does that say about their level of intelligence? I guess you don't have to be smart to make money.

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  8. Lew could assign his cause of action to someone with the money and interest in suing the Kochtopus.

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