Sunday, January 5, 2014

How Large a Company is Koch Industries?

Fortune magazine informs:
[If it weren't a private company], its $115 billion in revenues would be enough for it to rank No. 17 on the Fortune 500, with sales larger than those of Google, Goldman Sachs, and Kraft Foods combined.
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 [T]he brothers Charles and David Koch [...] are among the very wealthiest people in the world today. Each brother has a net worth estimated at $36 billion or more.
The brothers are major behind the scenes players at the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, George Mason University and the Mercatus Center. But they have not donated a penny to the Mises Institute. Think about that.

8 comments:

  1. Koch is not small. That's for sure. But judging a trading company by its revenues is an inappropriate measure of size.

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  2. I don't get the animosity toward Big L libertarian institutions. Aren't these guys more libertarian than statist? It seems like they get a lot of the free market stuff right.

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    1. They get the surface issues of the free market and liberty stuff right, but when it comes to the root issues, they're dead wrong. You can hack away at the branches all day long and make it look pretty, but it means nothing if the root still exists. This is what they do: they make a big deal out of surface issues like they did something great, but they distort issues that pertain to the root. This way for the average person that doesn't know any better, which is a lot of people, will align their thinking with certain government agendas. This may leave cognitive dissonance when people think about issues, but much like the military and conservative or liberals and welfare, they'll ignore this problem and just accept it because the root is still intact.

      - JS

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  3. "But they have not donated a penny to the Mises Institute. Think about that."

    Yup. That's because they're not actually free marketers. They're faux libertarians.

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  4. The Koch brothers are no more libertarian than Rand Paul, and that they call themselves libertarians tells me they either don't know what liberty means, or they are pretenders. In fact there are times I suspect they might just be a faction within the progressives who exploit the term libertarian.

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  5. I think organizations like FEE, Cato, GMU, Reason, Stossell, objectivists, etc serve a useful purpose even if they do trend towards watered down libertarianism or even sometimes neoconservatism or liberalism. They serve as something of an introduction point to libertarianism for people approaching it from different persuasions.

    Most people would dismiss outright a lot of the ideas shared on sites like EPJ, Mises, LRC, etc. Most people need a Ron Paul or an Ayn Rand or a Friederich Hayek as an intermediate point before they jump to Murray Rothbard, Hans Herman Hoppe, or Walter Block. I know I did. Anarchy is scary to the average person.

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    1. I think there is a crucial distinction to be made between not giving full-blown anarchism in your rhetoric right away and expliciting endorsing the role of the state in whatever (like taxes).

      When you are starting out with "newbies", you don't have to say everything you know to be true right away. But you should never say things you know are false.


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  6. Just a couple of nice guys with a really big Koch...

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