Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The Charles Koch Reaction to the Explosion of Youth Support for Ron Paul

As a follow up to my post, Koch-Funded Student Group Attacks Ron Paul, a friend has called me who has tentacles reaching deep into the Koch organization.

He tells me that Charles Koch was furious when Ron Paul started attracting large numbers of youth during his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. Koch would fume, "I spend all this money attempting to create a youth following and some guy out of the backwoods of Texas, who has no money, is attracting all these youth!"

The Students for Liberty organization is Koch's latest attempt to buy the liberty movement.

16 comments:

  1. Being a firearms enthusiast, I just have to laugh at these folks. We in the RKBA community are intimately familiar with folks trying to create movement with money and astroturf, and it never works (MDA, MAIG, anyone?). You can't stop an idea. Ron Paul was more about the ideas than himself, and it was apparent to anyone who would listen. Consistent, rational, and principled. Those are three words that I have never used to describe a politician other than RP. I wish more people understood that you just can't fake the funk. You either have it or you don't.

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  2. http://studentsforliberty.org/blog/2014/02/10/the-cato-institute-at-isflc/

    Cato is an SFL partner.


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  3. This is yet another staged fight between Koch and Mises Inst. The Koch Bros and Ron Paul see eye to eye with the John Birch Society on every issue. If you know how to do math, p = b, k = b, p = k.

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    1. ::yawn::

      An expected tenuous grasp of math.

      Basing this on that mythical Koch to Mises slush fund you've so expertly identified, but never shown anyone other than your pet socks, eh?

      You must have a seriously bored life to comment on virtually every, single post with the same predictable, contrarian nonsense.

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    2. Yet another Wolfgang comment offering no evidence, no support, just assertion. Never once has he provided anything to substantiate his Mises/Koch allegation, which he yammers incessantly, but for the intellectually dishonest, proof is never necessary.

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    3. This guy must be paid by the state to make things up....

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  4. I know that the Koch Bros. didn't get along with Murray Rothbard but I don't understand their animus toward Ron Paul. What is it specifically about Paul's agenda that they don't like? Or is it that just they can't control him with gobs of oligarch money?

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    1. They don't get along with Ron Paul for precisely the same reasons they couldn't get along with Rothbard. They couldn't control him. He's a non-interventionist. He's successful without their help (envy, much?). He doesn't want to join the establishment; he wants to disempower it. Last, but not least, Ron Paul is very associated with the same people and philosophies and academic disciplines with which Rothbard was associated and endorsed: Lew Rockwell and the Austrian Economists. Those are more than enough reasons, if you're the kind of people the Koch Brothers appear to be. The difference between the Austrians and Ron Paul, vs the Koch Bros. is that the former are principled and the latter are merely using their professed beliefs as a means to an end, a vehicle to amass personal power.

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    2. Absolutely nailed it.

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    3. Because the Koch brothers are not free marketeers at all; they are as you yourself hinted at "oligarchs". They have a cushy deal going with the state; they support corporate shills like Mitt Romney but do not donate a dime to Ron Paul.

      True anarcho-capitalism is anti-corporatism; anti-oligarchy. The Koch brothers are corporatists, plain and simple.

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  5. @Anonymous

    It's not Paul's economic agenda. It's Paul's other positions - pro-life and pro-family.
    (Folks doesn't like kids any more. It's only the adults and their sex lives that matter).

    It's Paul's supporters, who include Southern secessionists, 9/11 skeptics, diversity-deniers, and historical revisionists of all stripes.

    They tend to unsettle the bigots in power who so far have never had adults question them.

    So they like to throw around nasty names that intimidate junior professors without tenure but not many other people.

    I suppose, at some point, they are going to draw a line in the sand and make things more difficult for non-conforming opinion.

    Maybe this is one of those times...

    Or, maybe, it's a last ditch scramble, as they see their lies exploding in their faces..

    I've no idea, but I must say they're an enterprising lot
    They never seem to stop with the spin.

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    1. "It's not Paul's economic agenda. It's Paul's other positions - pro-life and pro-family. "

      Think of the long-term agenda. The more libertarians that are reproduced and taught through the family, the better the long-term prospects for libertarians. Libertarians that contracept and abort their own genetic future will bear little to no fruit.

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  6. I always thought it was Ron Paul's moral message that the establishment doesn't like. The immorality of the Federal Reserve and fiat money. The theft and immorality of taxation. The immorality of war powers. The immorality of placing the burdensome debt on future generations. This was his message. Koch Bros pimp a morally lax and morally slippery libertarian-light and conservatism as the official liberty movement. Hence the attacks against Ron Paul.

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    1. I think you have struck a key point, ie difference between Koch and LVMI

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  7. Pretty simple to see that Charles Koch isn't mad at Ron Paul, he is mad that his operatives can not figure out a way to attract the youth when a guy with little money can.

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