In two cases the Supreme Court is considering, herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island are challenging regulatory fees they say were never authorized by Congress. Critics of those lawsuits misleadingly complain that the sympathetic plaintiffs are "providing cover" for a corporate attempt to "disable and dismantle" environmental regulations.
These cases ask the justices to reconsider the Chevron doctrine, which requires judicial deference to an administrative agency's "reasonable" interpretation of an "ambiguous" statute. While big businesses might welcome the doctrine's demise, so should anyone who cares about due process, the rule of law, and an independent judiciary, which are especially important in protecting "the little guy" from overweening executive power.
Maybe you should not take my word for that, since I work for a magazine whose publisher, Reason Foundation, has received financial support from organizations founded by Charles Koch, chairman of the petrochemical company Koch Industries. The New York Times describes Koch as the "hidden conservative backer" of the New Jersey case, which involves lawyers employed by the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
The dispute at the center of these lawsuits is real, however, and it illustrates how vulnerable Americans are to the whims of federal agencies empowered to invent their own authority. The plaintiffs are family-owned businesses that cannot easily bear the financial burden imposed by the requirement that they not only make room on their cramped boats for observers monitoring compliance with fishery regulations but also pay for that dubious privilege.
That cost, which amounts to about a fifth of the money these businesses earn each year, adds insult to injury. "The framing generation was vexed enough by being forced to quarter British soldiers," writes Paul D. Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general who is representing the New Jersey plaintiffs, "but not even the British forced the unlucky homeowner to personally pay the redcoat's salary."
Worse, Clement notes, the relevant statute says nothing about collecting such fees from operators of herring boats in New England waters, although it does authorize them, within specified limits, for "certain North Pacific fisheries, limited access privilege programs, and foreign fishing." Two federal appeals courts, the D.C. Circuit and the 1st Circuit, nevertheless ruled that the unauthorized fees fit within the leeway required by Chevron deference.
The Department of Veterans Affairs took advantage of the same doctrine to deny a disabled veteran three years of benefits it owed him, relying on an arbitrary rule it invented for its own convenience. When the Supreme Court declined to hear that case in 2022, Justice Neal Gorsuch noted that Chevron deference systematically discomfits the weak in such disputes by allowing the government to rewrite the law in its favor.
"Many other individuals who interact with the federal government have found themselves facing similar fates," Gorsuch wrote, "including retirees who depend on federal social security benefits, immigrants hoping to win lawful admission to this country, and those who seek federal health care benefits promised by law." The examples he cited included a case he encountered as a 10th Circuit judge, involving an immigrant who was fighting deportation under an executive board ruling that contradicted the appeals court's prior interpretation of U.S. immigration laws.
The victims in such cases are not billionaires like Charles Koch. They are ordinary Americans who are hopelessly outmatched by government agencies that write their own rules.
For decades, that license allowed the Drug Enforcement Administration to keep marijuana in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act, a classification that President Joe Biden rightly says "makes no sense." As the Department of Health and Human Services implicitly conceded last August, that policy was based on a highly implausible reading of the statute.
The lawlessness fostered by the Chevron doctrine, in short, should give pause even to Koch's progressive critics. The Goliath in this story is not Koch Industries. It is an administrative state that has usurped the judicial power to interpret the statutes under which it operates.
© Copyright 2024 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post The <i>Chevron</i> Doctrine Discomfits the Weak appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Senior Editor Brian Doherty, author of the 2007 book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement, has interviewed dozens of people across the years about their role in creating and operating what has been over the past decade America's third most successful political party. Quotations have been edited and condensed for style and coherence. The interviews that comprise this oral history were conducted in 2022 with these exceptions: David Nolan (2005), Ed Crane (1998), Tonie Nathan (2005), David Bergland (1998), David Koch (2005), Ron Paul (2005), and Gary Johnson (2016). The Bob Barr quote came from a Reason interview conducted in 2008 by David Weigel; the Bill Weld quote is from a 2016 Reason interview conducted by Matt Welch.
When an internal caucus led a self-styled "takeover" of the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at its biennial national convention this past May, old-timers recognized a recurring conflict that has riven the party since its first national convention a half-century ago.
"The best analogy within the party history is 1983, when [Earl] Ravenal did not get the [presidential] nomination, and all the Cato people walked out," says Chuck Moulton, former vice chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC). "We see repeatedly with different caucuses, whether it be the Radical Caucus or the Pragmatic Caucus or whatever, they will gain attention, and then they'll leave, and then they'll come back. There's an ebb and flow."
From its founding in 1971 to its shock win of a rogue Electoral College vote in 1972 to on-again/off-again involvement of such significant American political figures as David Koch and Ron Paul to its current streak of three consecutive third-place presidential finishes, the party's goals have whipsawed strategically between making an impact in elections and simply winning converts, between making libertarianism go down smoother and making sparks with the movement's roughest edges.
With its presidential vote totals in the last three elections nearly double the total of every prior one put together, the L.P. after 50 years can't be counted out as a significant player in shaping the future of American political ideas, even if not elected officials.
David Nolan (1943–2010), inventor of the Nolan Chart which scores quiz-takers on a grid based on their belief in economic and civil liberties, co-founded the Libertarian Party in 1971.
David Nolan: It became obvious that despite some lip service, the Republicans were not the party of free markets or pro–individual liberty in any consistent sense. Nixon, this culture of lying and spying, was the antithesis of what this scattered band of less than a thousand liberty-minded young people had hoped. The average age of the people who formed the L.P. was around 28.
A bunch of us in Denver happened to meet on August 15, 1971, when Nixon on TV announced wage and price controls and taking us completely off the gold standard. So we started getting people to sign up and officially declared our existence on December 11, 1971. A first newsletter was sent out asking for strategy and tactics. We got a majority saying, "Yes, let's run someone for president."
Ed Crane, who co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977 and served as its president until 2012, was LNC chair from 1974 to 1977.
Ed Crane: I was a money manager for Scudder Stevens & Clark, dressed conservatively as I do today, and I went to the hotel for the founding convention. As a libertarian I always knew it was important to be tolerant of alternative lifestyles, but until I walked into that convention hall I had no idea how many alternatives there were.
Nolan: Sunday, June 18, 1972, began the first national convention. We named [John] Hospers as the first L.P. presidential candidate, and his running mate was Tonie Nathan. We were inventing a new thing, with 89 delegates from 23 states. The lengthiest debates occurred over Vietnam and free trade vs. national security, whether government can outlaw trade with enemy nations. Our solution was to say nothing on these two points, leaving candidates and local organizations to take their own stand.
D. Frank Robinson served on the first LNC board and co-founded the Oklahoma Libertarian Party.
D. Frank Robinson: No one else had any credentials that approached [those of Hospers], who was on the faculty of the [University of Southern California] philosophy department. He'd written a book on libertarianism—who's going to run against you on that?
Tonie Nathan (1923–2014) was the party's 1972 nominee for vice president.
Tonie Nathan: The way I got to the first L.P. convention was I saw an ad in Reason magazine: "Come to beautiful John Galt country!" That told me there were Randian ideas there; I considered myself an Objectivist. I got my degree in journalism and thought I'd go to Denver and take my camera and interview people for a daily local NBC show in Eugene [Oregon]. That's what I had in mind. I was surprised there wasn't more media there.
I thought [that an early draft of the statement of principles] was ridiculous, making conflicting statements, and I said, "You can't have a statement of principles that has no principles," and sat down. Nolan said, "Now, why can't everyone get to the point the way Tonie Nathan did?" The next day Bill Susel, one of Hospers' friends, approached me about being vice president. Of the party? "No, no, of the United States." I was surprised. I called my son, who had introduced me to Objectivism, and he and my husband thought it was a great idea. So I said yes.
Nolan: We were heavily Objectivist. In an early survey, three-quarters [of party members] considered themselves lowercase-o objectivists—can't use the big O without Rand's seal of approval—or at least objectivist-influenced; the other quarter were limited-government constitutional conservatives or anarchists, with the anarchist faction vehemently opposed to Vietnam.
The first L.P. convention adopted a membership pledge in which anyone signing up to join the party certified that they "do not believe in or advocate the initiation of force as a means of achieving political or social goals." It has been in place ever since.
Robinson: David [Nolan] was cognizant of the idea that we need to reinforce our nonaggression principles by saying we don't advocate violence. Within the parameters of constitutional politics, we were nonviolent.
Out of the 90 people sitting within the convention floor, we assumed there were at least one or two FBI informants.
Crane: One of the things that encouraged me—it sounds ridiculous in hindsight—is we got 980 write-in votes for Hospers. The idea that there were 980 people willing to write in the name of a Libertarian for president was very encouraging. We were on the ballot only in Washington and Colorado.
Nathan: I was watching the news when I get a phone call—it's a man saying his name is Roger MacBride, and he says, "I wanted you to know I'm going to vote for you for vice president." I didn't understand, because the election was over. It dawned on me slowly he was a state elector telling me he was going to cast a vote for Hospers. "I think Nixon has lost his way; I can't vote for him."
He wanted to know [if] he had my name right. I told him Theodora was my real legal name, but I never used it. I heard that at the announcement [of Virginia's electoral votes, someone said] there was one vote for "Theodore Nathan," and someone corrected: "Theodora." And [the person announcing] turned around: "What? A woman?"
David Boaz, longtime executive vice president of the Cato Institute and now a senior fellow there, co-managed Ed Clark's 1978 California gubernatorial campaign.
David Boaz: [The 1975 Libertarian Party convention] was at a hotel across the street from Penn Station. A few hundred people were there. When I walked in, a couple of people were having a screaming fight in the middle of the lobby. So that was my introduction to libertarians. It was probably the first time I was in a place where I heard there was a meeting of gay delegates, gay libertarians.
Robinson: Everybody was very grateful that [Roger MacBride had] bucked the system to cast his electoral vote, and the guy didn't say anything to antagonize anybody. There was no reason for him not to be the nominee.
David Bergland (1935–2019) was the vice presidential nominee in 1976, the presidential nominee in 1984, and a two-time chair of the LNC.
David Bergland: When it came time for the vice presidential nomination, Roger wanted [then–Reason editor] Manny Klausner, who would have been excellent. But this was a bunch of Libertarians who had power under the rules to elect who they wanted, and they wouldn't just let Roger point at who he wanted. The nominating process got locked up.
[On] Saturday, [anti-tax activists] Karl Bray and Hank Hohenstein called me [in California] and said if you fly out here you can probably get nominated. I called the airlines and there was enough time to get a red-eye out to New York, and I was nominated along with lots of others, and won it on the first ballot [that I was part of], and I became the 1976 vice presidential candidate.
MacBride was wealthy himself; he bought a damn DC-3 and had it outfitted to fly around as his campaign plane. Crane named it No Force One, and Roger flew himself around the country. About the only time he ever hit news was when one of the plane's engines started to smoke and we had to fly back: "L.P. candidate plane in trouble!"
MacBride/Bergland received only 0.21 percent of the popular vote, but an anti-tax, anti-inflation mood was rising across the country, and with it Libertarian ambitions.
Crane: I rolled up my sleeves and convinced [Los Angeles–based lawyer] Ed Clark to run for governor of California [in 1978]. And he got 377,000 votes, 5.6 percent, over 10 percent in some counties, with a very minimal campaign, [though] he was on the radio all the time. That breathed life into the party.
Boaz: I went to California to co-manage the Clark for Governor campaign. Tom Palmer and I were grabbed and sent to Southern California to circulate [ballot-access] petitions and also manage a team of models [who were] always looking for day work. So six to eight attractive young women were circulating petitions for Clark.
Perhaps the high point of the campaign was when we got a phone call telling us that the Bakersfield, California, newspaper was going to endorse Clark. That made the top-of-the-hour radio news when it came out, like: Significant newspaper had endorsed a third party candidate!
Clark was on the ballot as an independent because that was easier to meet signature requirements, but our campaign materials always said Libertarian.
Bob Costello, who in 1994 would found Americans for Limited Terms, was co-chair of the Clark for Governor campaign.
Bob Costello: Cato was across the street [in San Francisco]; they had a really nice office. We were in the warehouse with Libertarian Review magazine and the Students for a Libertarian Society. I got to California the evening Prop. 13 passed. We were thinking we were going to change the world, that we'd elect a Libertarian president in the next eight years.
When Dan White killed the mayor and Harvey Milk, then he got off on the Twinkie defense, there were riots, and some libertarians participated in the riots and burning of cars and stuff. We had a picnic in Golden Gate Park one time, all our libertarian crew, and guys in skinny ties were on the hill taking photos of us. I had a college friend I drove to the airport to pick up, and somebody tailed me all the way to the airport and back to the office. My friend got out of the car and went back to [tell them], "I got nothing to do with this guy's politics, we're just friends, don't add me to a list!"
Dick Randolph, who served two terms as a Republican in the Alaska House of Representatives from 1970 to 1974, became the first elected Libertarian state legislator in 1978, serving another two terms.
Dick Randolph: There were a couple of hippie-type kids at the state fair doing the [Nolan Chart quiz]. They said, "Get over here and take the test." So my first introduction to the L.P. were these two hippies.
My next contact was [a friend who knew] Roger MacBride, who was coming to Fairbanks as the Libertarian candidate for president. I said, "I don't want to meet a hippie running for president." She talked me into coming. And here's Roger, three-piece suit, button-down guy. Made lots of sense.
I was the only real politician [MacBride] had seen at a Libertarian function. He talked me into running his campaign in Alaska. I knew a lot of good people in the state, took six months of my life running his campaign, and got 6 percent statewide and 12 percent in Fairbanks, where I lived.
Roger did well enough that two years later, I'm thinking maybe there's something to this. So I decided to run for the legislature again and got a team of three other guys, all from Fairbanks, credible people, good reputations and good businesses, to run with me. We ran as a Libertarian team. All our signs said, "If you really want change, here we are," you know? Unfortunately I was the only one elected—barely. [As a Libertarian] you have to defend prostitution, gambling, all the sins. That's a tough way to run a campaign.
I had way more fun the second time as a representative. I was a minority of one, made lots of noise, got lots of press. I was very much a populist. Not only did I get reelected but I recruited a good friend [Ken Fanning]. Popular, a fish-and-game guy; he ran an operation called the [Great Denali-McKinley Trespass]. Mount McKinley Park was being run in a dictatorial way by the federal government, and a lot of people were pissed. Ken had several thousand people just go into the park and do whatever they wanted to do, cut down trees, kill birds. You're thinking that's not a popular thing to do, but it made Ken pretty famous statewide.
I was the top vote-getter the second time instead of the last [among those elected], and Ken was second. We did an initiative to repeal the state income tax. It was going to be on the ballot, and the Republican governor, Jay Hammond, hated it, and called a special session to keep it off the ballot. But in the special session, in three days, we totally repealed the state income tax.
At the signing of the bill that ended the income tax, there was a big picture [taken] and I wasn't invited! My role in the process didn't get recognized at all. But I feel much better about my four years as a Libertarian than my four years as a Republican.
David Koch (1940–2019), along with his brother Charles, was one of the biggest donors and institution builders in the libertarian movement. (He was a trustee of Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason, for 36 years.) Decades before drawing the ire of the left for GOP fundraising, Koch in 1980 ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket.
David Koch: Ed Crane and Charles thought I should be recruited to be the vice presidential candidate, because campaign finance law permitted candidates to spend as much of their own money as they could afford on their own campaign. I spent several hundred thousand helping finance the campaign, paying for national TV spots. I did it voluntarily, and it was the fundamental reason why we did so well, got a million votes. I spent a third of my time campaigning over 14 months, visited 27 states.
I'd fly into some city and never knew who was going to greet me—a bunch of bearded long-haired crazies smoking pot or sophisticated businesspeople, and everything in between. One thing we accomplished is that in the 1970s the word libertarian connoted an extreme point of view. I think the campaign we waged with Ed Clark was superb, very responsible, defensible, and I think we legitimized the libertarian philo-sophy and made it a credible point of view.
Boaz: The Clark campaign was organized around getting ideas across in a way that is not outside the bounds of what was politically plausible. When John Anderson got in [the 1980 presidential race as an independent], we recognized he was going to provide a more prominent third-party choice, maybe taking away our socially liberal, fiscally conservative, well-educated vote, and he ended up getting 6 percent. We just barely got 1 percent. And although we said, "This is unprecedented, blah blah," in fact we were very disappointed.
After the Clark/Koch showing of 1.06 percent, popular Orlando talk radio host Gene Burns began seeking the Libertarian Party presidential nomination in 1983.
Bergland: Gene Burns had a very overstated perception of what the party was and what kind of support we could give him for a presidential campaign. The Clark campaign had given everyone an overblown view of what was possible if you didn't have Koch money to do it. Gene kept going around the country making appearances [at Libertarian events], and there really wasn't any opposition. Then about a week before the convention he announced he wasn't going to do it and dropped out of sight. So now what the hell are we gonna do? I talked to my wife, said I'll offer myself.
Koch: In the '83 convention we supported a candidate who was more along the lines of Ed Clark, really a good guy, Earl Ravenal. Great credibility, a man with legit credentials. The opponent of Earl was a much more radical libertarian who was going, "I think taxation is theft, and support of the military should be voluntary"—all these hardcore ideas we thought would discredit the libertarian movement and would be the death knell of the party, so extreme [that] the people who had voted for us in '80 would be extremely turned off.
And that's what happened. The vote totals collapsed, and the party was taken over by the extreme wing, and so I have not supported the party since.
Nolan: The problem was Ravenal had no track record as a libertarian. Some good credentials, sounds like a nice enough guy, but who is he? We didn't know him, didn't trust him. That he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations did not sit well.
The lure of alleged credibility with national media and another infusion of Koch money swayed a lot of people, and it was a close race. [But then] the Koch-Crane-Cato faction, despite swearing they were in for the long haul, literally got up and walked out of the convention hall [after Ravenal failed to win the nomination]. A fifth of the delegates walked out—our biggest single schism.
Bergland: My nomination was a surprise, so we didn't really have any campaign organization at the time of the convention. And as we tried to get set up, all the Koch money was gone and the Crane people [were] all busy at Cato and not gonna bother with my campaign. I could spend time most productively and build for the future by trying to do as good a job as possible in getting journalists clear on who we were and what we stood for. We'd get the standard "You don't have a chance to win, so why are you running?" and I'd say, "[Democratic candidate Walter] Mondale doesn't have a chance to win, why don't you ask him that question?"
After Bergland's 0.25 percent showing in 1984, the party at its 1987 nominating convention saw a stark choice between the former GOP congressman Ron Paul and the radical American Indian Movement activist Russell Means, who had faced federal charges for his role in a 1973 occupation at Wounded Knee that resulted in two deaths. Paul won, narrowly, and was the presidential candidate in 1988.
Ron Paul: If you just put it down on paper and put Russell Means here and me here, and what I've done, you'd think you shouldn't even have to campaign. You'd think I'd get a little more credibility. It was much tougher than it should have been. If we hadn't worked at it, we'd have lost the thing, which would have been pretty embarrassing.
Mary Gingell was LNC chair from 1991 to 1993, after serving two prior terms as vice chair.
Mary Gingell: I was somewhat sympathetic to Russell Means, and feeling that Ron Paul had a bit of a conservative bent. That wasn't comfortable to me.
I came from the conservative world. I was part of Young Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom; I actually worked in their national office during college, and I was glad to get away from that. So anything that smacks of conservatism makes me a little nervous. I probably was a Means supporter on the first ballot. He was much more of a heroic figure in a sense. Since then, I've come to appreciate Ron Paul a lot more. But I think at the time, Russell Means seemed more like the hero.
Bergland: The Paul campaign was a departure to the extent [that] you can think of us as having a long enough history to have a departure from. Paul was a Republican who came to the party, and his core support group had not been active with the party. We took this guy who was in essence an outsider.
An argument in favor was [that] he came from the hard-money investment area, so he'd bring lots of people in with fat checkbooks, and that would be good. Also, he was prominent enough to run enough of a campaign to get new members, and that would be good too. But neither of those two things happened.
Paul: When I ran [for Congress] in 1974, essentially nobody knew what I was doing, and even when I won in 1976 for a total of three and a half terms, there were very few who understood. In the 1970s, libertarianism was just coming alive, and I'd have liberal Democrats more often recognize that there was something different and strange [about me] compared to conservative Republicans. But by the time I went back [to the GOP after running for president as a Libertarian], there was a lot of difference. Part of my motivation was to see if I could make our ideals palatable in the Republican Party, which was a bigger challenge.
Paul received 0.47 percent of the vote in 1988, the party's second-best showing to that point, but in 1992 he chose to back Republican presidential challenger Pat Buchanan. In 1996 he returned to Congress as a Republican, serving until 2012 and running for the GOP presidential nomination twice. Paul's running mate, Andre Marrou, who had served from 1985 to 1987 in the Alaska legislature as a Libertarian, had an easy time securing the 1992 nomination. But things quickly soured from there.
Gingell: The National Committee got this big packet of materials from [Marrou's former chief of staff] Michael Emerling, talking about how Marrou was basically a bad guy, that he didn't pay child support and he didn't handle his finances well, and blah blah blah, and we should remove him as the presidential candidate. Meanwhile, the national party is frantically pedaling to get ballot access, and we were going to have to deal with this. So basically, whatever our agenda has been, who knows? It got hijacked, and we spent seven hours going through this report, item by item, with Marrou.
The only thing we can take him out for is for conducting his campaign not in accordance with the platform. That's what the bylaws say. That's what we can use to remove a presidential candidate. Otherwise, the will of the delegates is sacred. The National Committee is supposed to support that candidate. So this is what we did.
Steve Dasbach was LNC chair from 1993 to 1998 and campaign manager for presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen in 2020.
Steve Dasbach: They did not remove him from the ticket. It was clear that the material had come from staff on the campaign, and some of the staff members were terminated. And so three people from the National Committee were tapped to essentially run the remainder of the presidential campaign. We had to try to figure out how to run a presidential campaign on the fly as three volunteers.
After the Marrou tumult, the party twice nominated the genial investment adviser and bestselling author Harry Browne, who generated two fifth-place finishes.
Bergland: Harry Browne produced all kinds of people with big checks, not just for his campaign but for the party, all done in a way to build the party. Harry's campaign was killer. It was great. In his field of investment commentary he was tremendously revered. There were people who'd say, "Harry Browne's name is on it? How much money do you want?"
Dasbach: What I focused on [as national chair] was building a consensus that included both the radical side and the pragmatic side, with membership growth as the key indicator. If you increase membership growth, everything else will come along with it. If you've got more members, you're going to be able to raise more money, you're going to be able to hire the staff you need, and you can get more media. More candidates will be able to organize more counties, and you'll get better functioning organizations.
From the time that I was elected we went from 10,000 members to 30,000 [by the end of 1998]. At the end of my second term, we went from, I think, $850,000 raised in '93 to $2.5 million the year I stepped down as chair. Then in the middle of my term as executive director, we got our maximums in terms of membership and fundraising. We had 33,000 members [at the end of 2000], raised $3.3 million. I think in 2002 we were just over 300 people in elected office.
Author and software engineer Michael Badnarik narrowly beat out Hollywood producer Aaron Russo and radio host Gary Nolan for the 2004 presidential nomination.
Nathan: Badnarik was campaigning in Portland [Oregon] and he wanted a ride—I didn't know he didn't drive. He asked if I'd take him to a copy shop. While waiting to get copies, we talked, and when he gets going he's one of the most eloquent men. That's what got him the nomination: In the debate he was right on the issues, but more than that he was inspiring in the way he discussed them. I was torn between the notoriety—wrong word, fame of Russo, well-known in Hollywood, agent for Bette Midler. But a Libertarian audience wants to know that if their candidate is being quoted in media that he knows how to put the ideas in the right way. It's hard for Libertarians to know the difference between truth and principle and not saying anything that alienates a lot of people. They tend to alienate many.
Dasbach: We finally got far enough past 9/11 to send a mailing out, and then the anthrax hit. And that was our post office that got hit! Which basically shut down all of our mail. We used email fundraising to try to cover the gap. People were hesitant about anything to do with mail because of anthrax. You know, they get a letter from D.C.? "Oh, I don't know about this." It crushed our returns.
After four consecutive elections with candidates not widely known as politicians, the Libertarian Party once again rallied behind a former GOP congressman who'd only lately changed his spots: Bob Barr. His running mate was a fast-talking Las Vegas media personality named Wayne Allyn Root. But a lot of the political energy around libertarian ideas in 2008 centered on Ron Paul's first run for the GOP nomination that year.
Bob Barr: The way I look at it, it isn't as if Ron Paul built this foundation over here and our campaign built this one over here, and they're discrete components. We're building one foundation. What Ron Paul did was a tremendous benefit to the libertarian movement in making people aware of the movement, of our philosophy, of elements people don't usually hear about in a coherent way.
In the next two cycles, the party's presidential nominee was the former Republican governor of New Mexico, Gary Johnson. He brought the party unprecedented levels of publicity, fundraising, and votes, as did his running mates, Judge Jim Gray (in 2012) and former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld (in 2016). Along with that attention came internal discontent over how radically libertarian the party should be.
Gary Johnson: I think if you start talking about end goals that are completely unachievable…how about a goal that is achievable but gets you closer to the end result? It's pragmatic.
My prediction is there are going to be all sorts of former Republican elected officials who would love to shed all that social dogma, and the Libertarian Party is going to find itself in a position of: Holy cow, we got some real choices here!
Bill Weld, since the announcement [of being the vice-presidential candidate], has gotten more press than any declared Libertarian candidate in the history of the Libertarian Party. At the end of the day I am a Libertarian, and that infers loose screws. [Weld] brings a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. We got 32 requests one morning for national media after the Weld news.
Bill Weld was a two-term Republican governor of Massachusetts before running for vice president as a Libertarian in 2016, then seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 2020.
Bill Weld: [Libertarians who mistrust my bona fides] don't know that in my first day in office in Massachusetts, I started my first press conference saying, "Fellow libertarians." They don't know in law school my favorite author was Friedrich Hayek. When I went as a fairly new governor to the [1992 GOP] convention that nominated George H.W. Bush, all the governors got to make a short speech, and mine began: "I want government out of your pocketbook and out of your bedroom." I'm an economic conservative and socially tolerant and inclusive.
Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan left the GOP in 2019, joined the L.P. in April 2020, announced his intent to seek the presidential nomination, and withdrew from the race three weeks later. Jo Jorgensen, a little-known university lecturer who had run on the 1996 ticket with Harry Browne, narrowly secured the nomination.
Jo Jorgensen: I got more votes, both percentage-wise and more numbers, than Gary Johnson got in his first campaign. It shows that people now are looking for an alternative, and they do like our message. The fact that me—no name, you know, I've never held office, I'm basically a schoolteacher—I'm out there spreading these ideas, and people jumped on board, and I got more votes than the two-term governor. I think that that shows maybe we don't need to have a politician who's held office. But also it shows that people are finally fed up with the old system and they are finally seriously looking for new alternatives.
There are many people who think you need to pass a purity test in order to be in the party. You know, "We don't want you unless you agree with us on everything." I'm going to want to let anybody in who will pay their dues who are for the cause. I can't imagine somebody who's a fascist wanting to join the movement. I was at the Florida state [L.P.] convention, sitting at the banquet, and I said, "I think we should let in people who are 70 [percent libertarian] because once you start talking to each other and you see the validity of having people make their own decisions instead of the government, then they get won over." And somebody sitting at the table said, "It's funny you said, that because I joined the party as a 70. I did move to 100 and I became an LNC member for two terms." So I want to bring in people who are interested in liberty, even if they're not 100.
Dasbach: Despite Bill Weld's flaws as a Libertarian standard-bearer, he was very effective at bringing in money. And he was very effective at calling his media contacts and getting them both on major media. So when people complained [that the Jorgensen campaign] didn't do as well as Gary Johnson's? Well, yeah, we didn't have Bill Weld raising $10 million from his donors. That what you want? Most guys who are complaining, that's not what they wanted.
[The Jorgensen campaign raised nearly $3 million] from 40,000 donors. And of those 40,000, 30,000 weren't in the database; they were new people that heard about the campaign, liked what they heard, and donated. Jo did, in my estimation, extraordinarily well for a candidate who did not have any particular reason for the nation to be aware of her. And this was the second-highest vote total in our party's history, the only higher one being Johnson [on his second run]. And we got the lowest cost per vote of any campaign in the party's history.
Starting in 2017, the Mises Caucus, seeing itself as a place within the L.P. for disciples of Ron Paul, began challenging what it saw as milquetoast messaging from candidates and party leadership. The critique became acute over what Mises members viewed as the national party's failure to speak out sufficiently against COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates and over alleged "woke" messaging, such as Jorgensen tweeting that "we must be actively anti-racist." At the 2022 Nevada party convention, the caucus completed what it had been billing as "The Takeover."
Chuck Moulton is a former vice chair of the LNC and former state chair of the Pennsylvania and Virginia Libertarian Parties.
Chuck Moulton: I've been saying for decades [that] the Libertarian Party is ripe for takeover, in that we are a fairly small party. If you want to win the presidential nomination, how do you get the most [L.P. national convention] delegates? The way to do that is to go state by state, make sure your people are the ones elected delegates. So if you figure out who your people are and you get them organized, it's really easy to take over the delegation. To the extent that you can subsidize that, you can get more of your people there relative to your opposition. [The Mises Caucus] went state by state, and they got a bunch of delegates, and they just out-organized everyone else. They were well-organized because they cared and they put in the time and the money.
Gingell: I consider the end of my term [as national chair] to be the beginning of this gradualist movement, which if you listen to a lot of the talk from the Mises Caucus they were railing against. It took years, but finally someone said "no more" to just this gradualist, watered-down stuff.
From what I saw them do in Nevada, they strengthened the platform with one exception, abortion. I was sitting next to [a Mises Caucus delegate], and he explained to me the reason they wanted to kill [the abortion plank] is because they have a theory that there are all these Republicans who are really libertarians except on the abortion issue, and that that scares them off. They improved the platform otherwise. That's why I came away with a positive feeling.
Dasbach: There is this notion—it is not unique to the Mises Caucus; it's been around for a long time. Michael Cloud had an [1978] article about "The Late, Great Libertarian Macho Flash," which meant presenting issues in the most provocative way that's guaranteed to get a reaction. This is how you attract attention, right? But it ends up pushing people away.
A good example is, how are you going to legalize cocaine? Now, we actually think that no drug should be illegal. That includes cocaine. But if you purposely go out and lead with an example like cocaine, you are trying to be provocative in a way that's going to shut people off, as opposed to talking about the idea that we shouldn't be putting people in prison for choosing to use drugs.
It's not a case of being pragmatic vs. radical. It's being intentionally obnoxious. "Well, that's how you get attention." Yeah, you can get attention that way, but it's usually negative. You get this great increase of Twitter engagement, but 99 percent of the interactions are negative, basically people attacking their positions. This is not accomplishing our objectives.
Bergland: If the party didn't exist, people would look around and say, "We really ought to have a party that pushes libertarianism." If this particular structure were to get in big trouble, someone would say, "Can't let that happen. Let's rebuild it."
The post The Libertarian Party's Internal Strife Is as Old as the Party Itself appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Stand Together is a charitable organization founded by Charles Koch that gives money to libertarian groups and causes. It works to advance classically liberal ideas on a variety of issues: school choice, criminal justice reform, regulation, and foreign policy, to name just a few. Stand Together works with right-leaning organizations on some of these issues, left-leaning organizations on other issues, and also with organizations that don't neatly fit the left-right paradigm. (Disclosure: Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason, receives support from Stand Together.)
Unfortunately, many progressive journalists—and even some populist conservatives—view everything connected to Charles Koch and his late brother David as nefarious by default. In their zeal to denounce the Koch brothers' influence on American politics, they end up attacking policies that they should otherwise support.
Case in point is this bizarre and misleading "exclusive" report on Stand Together from Judd Legum, a progressive journalist who writes the newsletter Popular Information. Legum accuses Stand Together of supporting a "partial victory" for Russia in Ukraine, and wanting the U.S. to drop "virtually all" Russian sanctions.
BREAKING: The main non-profit group run by billionaire Charles Koch says the US should drop virtually all sanctions and push for a resolution that includes a partial "victory" for Russia, according to an internal email obtained by https://t.co/Gl6evXRDcZhttps://t.co/dJCMzFTihF pic.twitter.com/K7FvxfYTEN
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 6, 2022
"In an internal email obtained exclusively by Popular Information, Stand Together, the influential non-profit group run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, argues that the United States should seek to deliver a partial 'victory' to Russia in Ukraine," writes Legum. "The email was sent to Stand Together staff by Dan Caldwell, the group's Vice President of Foreign Policy, on March 16. The subject line was 'An Update on Ukraine.'"
Nowhere in his article does Legum share the email in its entirety: Instead, he selectively quotes from it, leaving out important, clarifying context. He also takes great pains to portray skepticism of the long-term effectiveness of economic sanctions as some kind of kooky, fringe belief.
Legum describes Caldwell's email as offering a "boilerplate" denunciation of Russian President Vladimir Putin that "quickly pivots" to a "broad rebuke of international efforts to sanction the Russian government," as if the sentiment expressed is brief or insincere. Here is the relevant section of the email:
I wanted to take a moment to better connect you to our sense of things regarding the war in Ukraine.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine is immoral, unjustified, and should be immediately halted. In addition, the regime of Vladmir Putin is authoritarian and has inhibited the Russian people from enjoying the benefits of a free and open society.
Throughout our decades-long history, our community has consistently stood against unjust wars and advocated for peaceful relations between nations.
So while we support the Ukrainian people, we also must do everything we can to prevent escalation and reduce the threat of nuclear conflict.
Understandably, the invasion of Ukraine and the suffering inflicted on its people by the Putin regime has evoked a strong response among us all. This has contributed to demands from some for the United States to take a more aggressive posture against Russia – including calls for actions that would entail direct military strikes against Russian forces, such as the imposition of a NATO no fly zone over Ukraine.
However, it is not in America's or anyone's interest for the war to escalate into a larger conflict between a nuclear-armed Russia and the United States. Especially not the Ukrainians, who will bear the brunt of a more violent and widespread conflict.
This is not to say the United States should do nothing.
I am not sure why Legum reads this as a "boilerplate" denunciation followed by a "quick pivot." I read it as sober and well-considered—in truth, I can't find anything with which to disagree. (Though perhaps Legum would say that I too am compromised by Koch dollars.)
In the next half of the statement, Caldwell expresses support for sanctions against specific Russian leaders, and says that broader sanctions should "never be taken off the table." But he perceptively questions whether broad-based, long-running sanctions have generally succeeded in the past, and provides various examples of regimes that withstood sanctioning:
The United States should support diplomatic efforts to help end the war. An outright victory by either Russia or Ukraine is increasingly unlikely and a diplomatic resolution is the path that best limits the bloodshed and minimizes the risk that the current war could escalate into a larger conflict.
On the question of sanctions, aggressive and targeted sanctions against Russian leaders are warranted. Additionally, sanctions are a legitimate tool of American statecraft and should never be taken off the table.
However, overly-broad sanctions rarely work as intended and often strengthen the authoritarian regimes that are being targeted while increasing the suffering of ordinary people – something you already see taking place in Russia. Additional examples of this dynamic in action include Iraq in the 1990s', Venezuela, Iran, and Afghanistan – all countries where people had no ability to hold their rulers accountable for the impact of the sanctions precisely because they were authoritarian regimes.
Most irresponsibly, Legum highlights the following line: "An outright victory by either Russia or Ukraine is increasingly unlikely and a diplomatic resolution is the path that best limits the bloodshed." He describes this as Stand Together advocating for the U.S. to "seek to deliver Russia a partial 'victory'."
But Caldwell clearly does not wish for Russia to achieve "victory," partial or otherwise; he is merely acknowledging that any peace will likely involve both Russia and Ukraine getting some things that they want. It's perfectly reasonable to concede that in order to end all the death and destruction, Putin will have to emerge from the conflict as something short of a complete and total loser.
Legum quotes two foreign policy experts—Brian Katulis and Daniel Fried—who think the current sanctions should remain in place and believe they are working to "reduce Putin's resources for further aggression." They are certainly entitled to that opinion; there is little reason to doubt that the sanctions are making things harder in Russia, including for ordinary Russians. But it is not crazy to wonder whether the sanctions will meaningfully prevent Putin from continuing the war in Ukraine, or whether the amount of suffering we are dispensing to the Russian people is ultimately counterproductive or even immoral.
5. But why is @speechboy71 so worked up about this and attacking me in an ad hominem way. I'm not sure.
Be he is a fellow at @egfound@egfound has accepted money from the Charles Koch Institute to advocate for "restraint" in foreign policyhttps://t.co/Z3Oiro9Xpq pic.twitter.com/YYvLj8kQ9J
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) April 6, 2022
Legum's article has drawn well-deserved criticism from Michael Cohen, a fellow at the Eurasia Group Foundation, and Emma Ashford, who works for the Atlantic Council. Both described Legum's piece as a "hatchet job," and rightly so.
In response, Legum criticized Cohen and Ashford on the grounds that their organizations also received Koch funding. But Legum's pet expert, Fried, is also affiliated with the Koch-funded Atlantic Council, so the insinuation that a Koch affiliation means we should automatically reject an expert's criticisms backfires in all directions here.
The overarching point of Legum's article is to cast aspersions on Koch Industries' decision to continue operating several glass manufacturing facilities within Russia. Koch Industries, for what it's worth, maintains it will not "walk away from our employees there or hand over these manufacturing facilities to the Russian government so it can operate and benefit from them."
But it's absurd to characterize Stand Together's skepticism of sanctions as anything other than a sincere belief held by some libertarians, noninterventionists, and a great many progressives. Indeed, Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), one of the most left-leaning members of the House, has taken an identical position. Progressive Reps. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) and Cori Bush (D–Mo.) voted against the U.S. ban on Russian oil imports.
Legum did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Koch Network Smeared as Pro-Russia for Suggesting Sanctions Might Not Work appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over the past 50-plus years, Charles Koch grew his family business, Koch Industries, into one of the largest privately held companies in America. At the same time, he played a leading role in creating or supporting the modern libertarian movement and some of its major institutions. Among them: The Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation, a nonprofit that supports many organizations, including Reason Foundation, which is the publisher of Reason magazine. Along with his brother David, a longtime trustee of the Reason Foundation who passed away last year at the age of 79, the 85-year-old billionaire became not only one of the most successful businessmen in the country but also one of the most controversial, with leftists blaming "the Koch brothers" for many of our contemporary problems.
Koch has just published Believe in People, a book that seeks to "offer a paradigm shift [that] calls for all of us to move away from the top-down approach to solving the really big problems" by instead "empowering people from the bottom up to act on their unique gifts and contribute to the lives of others."
In a conversation with Koch and his co-author, Brian Hooks, who is the chairman and CEO of Stand Together and the president of the Charles Koch Foundation, Reason's Nick Gillespie discusses the 2020 election, the successes and failures of the libertarian movement, and what Koch and Hooks see as the defining challenges and opportunities in the coming decade.
For a video version of this interview, go here.
The post Charles Koch and Brian Hooks: Believe in People appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over the past 50-plus years, Charles Koch grew his family business, Koch Industries, into one of the largest privately-held companies in America while playing a leading role in creating or supporting the modern libertarian movement and some of its major institutions. Among them: The Cato Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Mercatus Center, and the Charles Koch Foundation, a nonprofit that supports many organizations, including Reason Foundation, which is the publisher of Reason magazine. Along with his brother David, a longtime trustee of the Reason Foundation who passed away last year at the age of 79, the 85-year-old billionaire became not only one of the most successful businessmen in the country but also one of the most controversial, with leftists blaming "the Koch brothers" for many of our contemporary problems.
Koch has just published Believe in People, a book that seeks to "offer a paradigm shift [that] calls for all of us to move away from the top-down approach to solving the really big problems" by instead "empowering people from the bottom up to act on their unique gifts and contribute to the lives of others."
In a conversation with Koch and his co-author, Brian Hooks, who is the chairman and CEO of Stand Together and the president of the Charles Koch Foundation, Reason's Nick Gillespie discusses the 2020 election, the successes and failures of the libertarian movement, and what Koch and Hooks see as the defining challenges and opportunities in the coming decade.
Coordination producer: Drake Springer
Cameras by Rob Keyes, Benjamin Gaskell, Zach Weissmueller, and Paul Detrick; audio by Kyle Arnold; narrated by Nick Gillespie; edited by Ian Keyser and John Osterhoudt
Photos: AP Photo/Topeka Capital-Journal, Mike Burley; Kris Tripplaar/Sipa USA/Newscom; BO RADER/MCT/Newscom; Gage Skidmore/Creative Commons/Flickr; Gavin Peters/CC BY-SA 3.0/Wikimedia Commons; BO RADER/MCT/Newscom; AP Photo/David Zalubowski; Nicholas von Akron/Creative Commons/Flickr.
The post Charles Koch and Brian Hooks on Learning From Your Critics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>David Koch, the billionaire free market philanthropist, has died at the age of 79.
Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1940, Koch was a longtime member of the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, and a major force in the modern libertarian movement. He was also, along with his older brother Charles, one of the "Koch brothers," who are regularly invoked on the left as a primary cause of all that is bad in American politics.
Such lazy demonization belies a life and fortune spent trying to build a better world through business, politics, and culture, one in which people are not only more prosperous and tolerant but free to run their own experiments in living.
In 1980, Koch was the vice presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party, whose platform that year endorsed the then-radical notions of legalizing drugs, ending penalties for victimless crimes, and full acceptance of gays and lesbians. The platform also called for the abolition of the CIA and FBI in the wake of the Church Commission findings of widespread abuse. In 1987, he told Reason, "Pursuing a very aggressive foreign policy…is an extremely expensive endeavor for the U.S. government. The cost of maintaining a huge military force abroad is gigantic. It's so big it puts a severe strain on the U.S. economy, creating economic hardships here at home." Not surprisingly, he was a critic of the Iraq War and other 21st-century interventions.
He gave widely to libertarian organizations such as Americans for Prosperity and also to cancer research and the arts. In today's podcast, Nick Gillespie speaks with Reason Senior Editor Brian Doherty, the author of Radicals For Capitalism, a history of the libertarian movement, about the life and legacy of David Koch.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
The post The Libertarian Life and Legacy of David Koch appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>David Koch, who along with his brother Charles ran one of America's most prominent political giving machines, has died at age 79.
Koch was one of four children of the oil industrialist Fred Koch, and along with his older brother Charles he became one of America's richest men through the growth of the family business. Due to the brothers' funding of political causes and candidates, the Kochs became betes noir of the American left. (Koch was for 36 years a trustee of the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine.) Often incorrectly described as a conservative or a Republican, David Koch was a lifelong libertarian whose work and giving reflected the values of free enterprise and limited government.
Born in Wichita in 1940, Koch earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemical engineering from MIT, where he also excelled in basketball. After working for outside companies from 1963 to 1970, including a stint at the management consulting firm Arthur D. Little, Koch began working in the family business in 1970 as a technical service manager at the subsidiary Koch Engineering for a salary of $16,000. He rose to be president of the division, and he went on to serve in various capacities in the set of privately owned family businesses, including president of Koch Engineering and Executive Vice President of Koch Industries. He retired officially last year because of his fading health.
In a 2005 interview for my book Radicals for Capitalism, Koch told me his father taught him that "big government was bad, and impositions of government controls on our lives and our economic fortunes was not good." In the mid-1960s, with encouragement from Charles, he attended the Freedom School, an early libertarian educational institution run by Robert LeFevre, whose variety of libertarianism rejected both political activism and violence, even in self-defense. While LeFevre was one of their earliest exposures to the organized libertarian movement, both brothers denied that they ever embraced his entire package of ideas. As they began financing, working with, and guiding libertarian institutions in the 1970s, their activism involved support and promotion for the pro-market Austrian school of economics exemplified by Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek. Libertarian educational institutions, think tanks, legal action groups, grassroots activism, magazines, criminal justice reform efforts, and student groups all received largess and guidance from the Koch brothers from the 1970s through the present.
In the 1980 presidential campaign, when recently imposed campaign finance restrictions hobbled third parties' abilities to fundraise by severely limiting how much any single donor could give, David Koch took advantage of the fact that the rules allowed candidates themselves to self-finance as they wished: He became the Libertarian Party's vice presidential nominee. He and running mate Ed Clark got more than 1 percent of the vote, a party record that would go unbroken until 2016.
Koch told New York magazine during that campaign that he'd been excited by the previous Libertarian presidential run by Roger MacBride, saying the party was "advocating all the things I believed in. [MacBride] wanted less government and taxes and was talking about repealing all these victimless-crime laws that had accumulated on the books. I have friends who smoke pot. I know many homosexuals. It's ridiculous to treat them as criminals—and here was someone running for president, saying just that."
After winning the vice presidential nomination, Koch told the assembled Libertarian delegates that the party's members "represent the best hope for human freedom since the American revolution" and that "as a businessman, who's run a successful company, who's had to deal with the harassment and ridiculous interference of government in the affairs of my business….I can be particularly effective at communicating the libertarian ideas and concepts to the businessman." Koch listed the run as his "proudest achievement" in a 1987 MIT alumni newsletter.
In 1984 Koch co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy, a free market advocacy and research organization that later split into FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, both prominent players in 21st century Republican and libertarian circles in the pre-Trump age (though Koch was only directly involved with the latter). Koch continued to donate and to often serve on the boards of market-oriented advocacy groups, and the political operation funded and managed by him and Charles became notorious in the Obama age as the supposedly sinister face of money in politics.
As was his way, Koch mostly declined to participate in public controversies over his political beliefs or funding. But as he told me in that 2005 interview, he had come to see political philanthropy as finding "aggressive salesmen" who understand that you can have the best product in the world but if you aren't finding consumers to buy it, you need to do whatever it takes to sell it, including spending "staggering sums on advertising and promotion" in the mold of Procter & Gamble. You have to find talented people with good ideas, and try different approaches, to help generate political and philosophical change.
Koch was an inveterate experimenter in that process, to the great benefit of many libertarian institutions—he told me he'd been on as many as 20 boards at a time.
The vast bulk of Koch's philanthropy was not political. It included hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research (he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1992) and major arts and sciences institutions, museums, schools, and public television, with much of his institutional philanthropy centered in New York City, his home for decades.
He is survived by his wife Julia and their three children.
The post David Koch, R.I.P. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at The Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman takes note of the cross-ideological alliance trying to put an end to the U.S. military's participation in Saudi Arabia's deadly activities in Yemen. The alliance itself is not new. Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) and Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) have long been critical of our involvement with and funding of military actions that have killed innocents, especially since we are not officially at war with any of the nations involved.
What's new, Ackerman notes, is that the Charles Koch Institute is briefing conservative lawmakers about a resolution introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) that would direct the president to end all military action in Yemen that is not covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). To keep U.S. forces involved in the conflict, the White House would need to seek an explicit declaration of war from Congress.
The resolution has 69 co-sponsors right now, only three of which are Republicans (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky among them). The Koch Institute and libertarian-conservative FreedomWorks are going to be pushing Republicans to try to get a vote in November, after the midterms. Whether such a resolution would actually change anything is a question that deserves our skepticism. Every presidential administration since that of George W. Bush has used the AUMF to justify military activity against any terrorist organization overseas.
The subheadline of Ackerman's piece calls the Koch Institute's involvement "unexpected." Media companies should be past this by now, particularly since they've obsessed over the Kochs for nearly a decade. The Koch Institute's foreign policy page is very clear that while it supports a strong military, it's opposed to the sort of interventionist adventures associated that have defined our activities in the Middle East for years now. Here's a blog post from 2016 expressing concern about military actions in Yemen and the negative consequences of our alliance with Saudi Arabia.
In fairness, Ackerman's reporting does not treat it like an unexpected development. He notes that FreedomWorks has been lobbying for a year on a failed effort by Lee and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) to force a vote on military action in Yemen.
But it's nevertheless frustrating that the headlines tend to treat the Koch brothers' very common libertarian attitudes toward a number of policies as surprising. We saw it happen years ago where people seemed to be surprised at David Koch's position in support of gay marriage recognition in 2012, even though he, like many libertarians, had felt that way for quite a while (before many Democratic leaders, in fact). Media outlets seem to frequently feign surprise that the Kochs favor criminal justice reforms, even though they've supported such efforts for years.
There's a tendency among some media outlets to approach the Koch's libertarian brand of conservatism as though the brothers' deviation from typical Republican stances are unusual for them. They're not. When media outlets write this way, it tells libertarian audiences that they know very little about the Kochs and what separates libertarians from conservatives. Disappointing libertarians may seem like small potatoes, but it also misinforms people who know little about what distinguishes libertarians from Republicans. I would argue that this is actually bad: It allows Republicans to pass as lovers of liberty even when they're not, and—perhaps in rarer instances—it allows libertarians to join ranks with Republicans when they shouldn't. Treat them as distinct, and you make it harder for both groups to say one thing and then do another without consequence.
Disclosure: David Koch sits on the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this site.
The post Let's Not Treat Koch's Libertarian Opposition to U.S. Military Action in Yemen as 'Unexpected' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The demand that research funding be declined because of its origin poses a grave threat to academic freedom," Daniele Struppa, the president of Chapman University, wrote earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal. "I am being asked to turn down donations from the dreaded Koch brothers, even when…the proposal for funding was inspired, developed and fully fleshed out by my faculty, in the most important exercise of their own academic freedom."
In the culture wars playing out on the nation's campuses, Chapman University, a private university about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles, is one of the hottest combat zones. The university received $15 million to help fund The Smith Institute, which seeks to bring the study of economics and of the humanities together in a way that benefits both sides. The Smith Institute is named both for Adam Smith, widely considered the father of economics, and Vernon Smith, the 2002 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Because some of the money to fund The Smith Institute came from the Charles Koch Foundation, some students and faculty are protesting the Institute and demanding that the university return the gift. Across the country, groups organized by "UnKoch MyCampus" are pushing for schools to return any money from libertarian philanthropists Charles and David Koch, arguing that the money comes with ideological strings. (Disclosures: Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this podcast, receives money from the Koch foundation and David Koch has been on our board of trustees for over 25 years.)
But do funders actually dictate university research and teaching? Or is this simply an attempt to quash ideological diversity? And in an age when the humanities—the study of history, literature, art, philosophy, and more—are rapidly declining at universities, what are the best ways to revive interest in the very activities that make us, well, human? Those are some of the questions I put to Daniele Struppa in a conversation recorded at FreedomFest, the annual libertarian gathering held each July in Las Vegas.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Chapman U. President Doesn't Want His Campus 'UnKoched': Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Because everyone enjoys a good catfight, and journalists in particular like it when two of their biggest bogeymen go at each other's throats, today's big political news is obviously the Trump-Koch feud.
There's a significantly underreported aspect to the Koch donor network's growing objection to the Trumpian GOP's anti-libertarian actions on trade, spending, and immigration. Two of the three Senate races in which the network is reportedly declining to back Republicans—Nevada and Indiana—are not just widely considered by prognosticators to be "toss-ups"; each features Libertarian Party candidates who have previously cracked the 5 percent mark in elections.
Nevada's Tim Hagan, an engineer and longtime Libertarian activist, has on three occasions trounced the point spread in a swing-district state Senate election, earning 5.1 percent of the vote in 2016 (the Democrat won 47.9 percent to 47.0), 4.8 percent in 2008 (46.5–45.8), and 7.6 percent in 2006 (47.6–44.8). Hagan has never dipped below 3 percent in any of the nine elections he has run in, hitting a high of 23.7 percent in a 2014 race for Clark County assessor (in which no Republican ran).
And yet in this crucial swing-state race between vulnerable Republican incumbent Dean Heller and Democratic challenger Jacky Rosen, who the Real Clear Politics polling average separates by less than a percentage point, Hagan is nowhere to be found in six of the seven publicly available polls that have been conducted since he secured the L.P. nomination in early March. Only a Suffolk University survey of 500 likely voters last week included Hagan's name, showing him with 2.4 percent. (Heller edged Rosen in the poll, 41–40, while 8.6 percent were undecided and 5.4 percent went for none of the above.)
To reiterate a point I made a month ago about the New York gubernatorial race, not listing Hagan as an option constitutes journalistic malpractice. The last time Heller ran for re-election, winning by 1.1 percentage points, an Independent American Party candidate named David Lory VanDerBeek pulled down 4.9 percent of the vote. Gary Johnson won 3.3 percent in the Silver State two years ago, more than Hillary Clinton's 2.4-point margin over Donald Trump.
Nevada is a swing state, Heller-Rosen is neck-and-neck, and Republican control over the Senate rests on a 51–49 knife's edge in a possible Democratic wave year. If you want to know what's going to happen in (and to) this country, you need to put the damn Libertarian in your poll.
Indiana is arguably even more interesting as a disaffected-Republican thought experiment, since A) the Libertarian candidate in question is pro-life (though she doesn't think the federal government has any role in abortion policy), and B) she's going to be in the televised debates.
Lucy Brenton, who like Hagan has been active in Libertarian politics since the early 1990s, is a real estate entrepreneur and mother of 10 who in 2016 got 5.5 percent of the vote in the U.S. Senate race won by Republican Todd Young. Brenton this time is facing Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly and Republican Mike Braun for a seat that in 2012 drew 5.7 percent of the vote for Libertarian Andy Horning (who was accused, innumerately, of spoiling the election for losing Republican Richard Mourdock).
Indiana has one of the country's strongest Libertarian Party chapters. Four times in the past 12 years, L.P. senatorial candidates there have drawn more than 5 percent of the vote, twice as many as the next best state. So how many polls has Brenton appeared in since securing her party's nomination in May?
Zero. In fairness, there has been only one public survey since then. (The lack of good state-level data on Senate races is shocking, given the stakes involved.) Whenever you hear conjecture about the Indiana race, know that it's only that—until we start getting more and better polls that include the letter L.
The broader fact remains that there are alternatives on the ballot plausible to Republican voters who are weary of President Trump's illibertarian words and deeds. Matt Waters, the L.P. Senate candidate in Virginia, is very consciously providing a conservative-friendly option to the super-Trumpy GOP nominee Corey Stewart (drawing calls from the likes of Larry Sabato to have Waters included in polls).
I wouldn't bet on the Koch network flowing any money in a Libertarian direction—when you're into two-party politics, you're into two-party politics, which helps explain why CEO Emily Seidel of the political Koch group Americans for Prosperity is saying stuff like, "If you are a Democrat and stand up to Elizabeth Warren to corral enough votes for financial reform that breaks barriers for community banks and families, you're darn right we will work with you."
But as Nick Gillespie observed this morning, both major parties are shrinking by the day, rallying hardest around populist-nationalism on the right and populist-socialism on the left. Even David Brooks is yearning for a "third-party option" that stresses constitutionalism and decentralization, even if he can't quite bring himself to name the only national political party that does just that.
The 2018 midterms might end up being not just a referendum on Donald Trump, but an early indicator of whether the country's only other 50-state party is ready to meaningfully grow from its current position in a distant third place.
David Koch has long been a member of the Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees.
The post Toss-Up Senate Races Abandoned by Koch Network Feature Unusually Strong Libertarian Party Contenders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Back in San Francisco in 1967, there was an event that helped catalyze the "Summer of Love" and was variously billed as "Human Be-In" and "A Gathering of Tribes." It featured a variety of beat-hippie poets (Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder), popular area rock bands (such as the mostly forgotten Quicksilver Messenger Service), and Timothy Leary at peak guru-ness, proclaiming it was time to "turn on, tune in, and drop out."
The tribes included
leftovers from the North Beach Beat scene and Berkeley's antiwar protesters. It meant the Hells Angels and the flower children, and it meant impressionable high school teens and anybody on the cusp of either needing a haircut or deciding not to get one.
Organizers got lucky with the weather, which was sunny and unseasonably warm, conducive to bringing "family, animals, cymbals, drums, chimes, flutes, flowers, incense, feathers, candles, banners, flags," as one of the posters requested.
That was then, this is now.
Tribes these days are mostly political and you can leave the family animals, feathers, and flowers at home. Here's Steve Bannon, dismissed adviser to President Donald Trump, ranting about the Koch Brothers (Charles and David, both of whom contribute money to the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes this website, the latter being a longtime member of the board trustees) for insufficient loyalty to Fearless Leader:
"What they have to do is shut up and get with the program, OK?" Bannon said in an interview with Politico. "And here's the program: Ground game to support Trump's presidency and program, [and] victory on Nov. 6."
Bannon! How many divisions does he have these days? Well, here's Donald Trump himself, tweeting like a motherless child crying for his Maypo:
The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don't need their money or bad ideas. They love my Tax & Regulation Cuts, Judicial picks & more. I made…..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018
….them richer. Their network is highly overrated, I have beaten them at every turn. They want to protect their companies outside the U.S. from being taxed, I'm for America First & the American Worker - a puppet for no one. Two nice guys with bad ideas. Make America Great Again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2018
The Koch's sins are that they disagree with Trump on many issues, including criminal justice reform, trade, and immigration. They want more of it than the president and his supporters, who have managed in just a few years to utterly transform the GOP into the party of protectionists and xenophobes. It wasn't always this way, as anyone who remembers Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush can attest.
The president of the Charles Koch Foundation, Brian Hooks, puts it this way:
"The divisiveness of this White House is causing long-term damage," Brian Hooks, a senior Koch lieutenant, told reporters at the event. "When in order to win on an issue someone else has to lose, it makes it very difficult to unite people and solve the problems in this country. You see that on trade: In order to get to a good place on trade, convince the American people that trade is bad."
There's a reason why Donald Trump was able to win the presidency with 46 percent of the popular vote. Political tribalism, unlike its hippie counterpart, demands blind loyalty. Shut up and get with the program, as Steve Bannon puts it. But the tribe that Donald Trump and the Republican Party represent is growing smaller every day. The same holds true for Democrats as well. Each party has devolved into less-appealing clusters of incoherent special interests that, while being less representative of America in general demand even more unthinking loyalty. Go find a pro-choice Republican and a pro-life Democrat (these creatures once existed). Since when did believing in lower taxes mean you had to rage against millionaire football players for kneeling during the National Anthem? Or that allowing children brought here illegally by immigrant parents meant you had to support single-payer health care?
As Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina told Reason earlier this year (full interview, transcript here):
"You have two parties in a heterogeneous country where people have all kinds of views….It's simply not enough to represent diversity in this country."
In his latest book, Unstable Majorities: Polarization, Party Sorting, and Political Stalemate, Fiorina argues that Americans actually agree with each other on fundamental issues such as immigration, marriage equality, and pot legalization. The polarization we hear about is mostly restricted to political activists and media elites who mistake their own extreme views for those of the common people.
"Everybody worries about the average American being ensconced in a filter bubble," says Fiorina. "Most of the research suggests it's the elites who are in these filter bubbles…and have this biased view of the world."
Steve Bannon's bubble was burst a year ago when Trump sent him packing from the White House but he has re-emerged as a vocal defender of his former (future?) boss. Trump's repudiation of the Kochs lays out neatly one of the most scurrilous forms of argument: You are not allowed to criticize a system by which you benefit. Via his tax cuts, he made the billionaire brothers richer, therefore they have no right to say anything critical about me and my tribe.
This way madness—and increasingly precarious electoral majorities—lies, whether we're talking Trump Republicans or socialist Democrats, who are espousing their own version of shut up and get with the program. The upside is that such purity tests and demands will, as Fiorina points out, drive ever-more people out of the political duopoly and swell the ranks of independents who already comprise a plurality of American voters. Change is coming, always too slow, but it's coming soon to a polling place near you. And it will reward politicians and parties with a coherent, positive message about decreasing the size, scope, and spending of government and increasing individual autonomy.
Parting video: Among the various songs that may have been inspired by the Human Be-In was The Byrds' elegiac "Tribal Gathering," from their 1968 LP The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Take a listen below:
The post Koch Bros. Should 'Shut Up and Get With [Trump's] Program,' Says Steve Bannon appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A light rail ballot initiative in Nashville, Tennessee, went down in flames last month when two-thirds of voters rejected a $9 billion transit plan that would have hiked taxes on sales, hotels, car rentals, and businesses to pay for 20-plus miles of light rail and new bus rapid transit lines.
Apparently, it's all the Kochs' fault.
That's according to The New York Times, whose subtly-titled Tuesday article, "How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country," lays the blame for the defeat of this ballot measure—and a handful of other failed local transit initiatives—squarely at the feet of the billionaire brothers.
According to the Times, the Kochs have been deploying an army of Astroturf activists from Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a Koch-funded group, to successfully stop otherwise necessary and popular transportation measures that run against the pairs' ideological and financial self-interest. (Charles and David Koch also support Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.)
"The Kochs' opposition to transit spending stems from their longstanding free-market, libertarian philosophy. It also dovetails with their financial interests," writes the Times. "One of the mainstay companies of Koch Industries, the Kochs' conglomerate, is a major producer of gasoline and asphalt, and also makes seatbelts, tires and other automotive parts."
Fearful that demand for these products would fall should Nashville build a light rail network, the theory goes, the Kochs' tapped their Tennessee AFP chapter to wage a get out the vote campaign that saw activists make 42,000 phone calls and knock on some 6,000 doors. This activism flipped what was supposed to be a slam dunk into a crushing defeat.
It's a deliciously plausible narrative for those who see nefarious machinations behind anything remotely connected to the Kochs. It's also a story that falls apart upon a closer examination of the details.
For starters, it's hard to believe that the canvassing operation of a single organization—no matter how effective—would be able to produce a landslide victory for a "no" campaign that was going up against some pretty stacked odds. (As the Times noted, the light rail expansion "was backed by the city's popular mayor and a coalition of businesses. Its supporters had outspent the opposition, and Nashville was choking on cars.")
Indeed, when the Tennessean's Nashville reporter Joey Garrison analyzed the reasons for the campaign's defeat, the Kochs and AFP didn't even make the list. Instead, he pinned the blame on things like the decision to put the light rail initiative on the low-turnout May ballot; opposition from black leaders and voters concerned about light rail–spurred gentrification; a muddled promise-all-things message from the "yes" campaign; and the untimely mid-campaign resignation of Nashville mayor and light rail superfan Megan Barry, who was forced out of office over a sordid sex-and-spending scandal.
Former Nashville City Councilwoman Emily Evans likewise failed to mention the Kochs in her rundown of what went wrong for Nashville transit enthusiasts.
"There were a host of reasons [the proposal failed], like the cost ($9 billion), the scale (20 plus miles of light rail), the funding source (sales tax increase) and the financing structure (a decade of interest-only payments)," said Evans in an email to CityLab.
These are more plausible explanations, but they lack the dramatic appeal of shadowy monied interests subverting democracy from afar.
This is not to say that AFP had no effect. The Times article describes an effective outreach campaign that focused on contacting suburban voters likely to bristle at the idea of a massive tax increase to pay for a light rail system few of them would use. (Nashville's light rail plan would have boosted sales taxes to the highest rate in the nation.)
This is hardly as conniving as the Times story makes it out to be. Instead, AFP's actions show the benefit of money in politics as a way to boost voter engagement in what would have otherwise been a low-turnout, low-information election.
Contrast that with Seattle's $54 billion Sound Transit 3 light rail initiative that easily coasted to victory over a practically non-existent opposition and is now facing a fierce public backlash from voters who missed the fine print about all the taxes and fees included in the initiative. Had a more effective opposition campaign been mounted, the electorate might have been more cognizant of these costs when they voted.
More ludicrous still is the idea that the Kochs are taking special interest in light rail initiatives in an attempt to shore up demand for gas and auto parts. Despite increasing transit spending by all levels of government, car sales continue to trend comfortably upwards as do vehicle miles travelled. Fuel consumption is down from a pre-recession high, but that has a lot more to do with increasing fuel efficiency than a sudden popularity of mass transit. (With the exception of growing and densifying Seattle, transit ridership is down in real terms across the country.)
Indeed, were the Times looking to find a clear profit motive in Nashville's light rail fight, it should have taken a closer look at the "yes" side.
One of the main contributors to that campaign was the Citizens for Greater Mobility PAC, which spent roughly $2.1 million on the initiative, nearly double the money spent by the "no" side.
According to campaign finance disclosure reports, donors to Greater Mobility included a number of engineering firms who offer transportation expertise, including CDM Smith (who gave $55,000) and CH2M Hill ($15,000), HDR Inc ($25,000), and Smith Seckman Reid, Inc. ($25,000). The National Association of Realtors kicked $150,000 to the PAC. (Real estate prices tend to go up when a light rail line goes in.)
Even industries the Times intimates have a financial interest in fighting light rail chipped in to the pro side, including tire company Bridgestone, which gave $100,000 to the Greater Mobility PAC. Apparently the benefit of having a major transit station installed a couple blocks from its national headquarters and right in front of a hockey arena that bears its name—as the Nashville light rail plan called for—outweighed the lost revenue from new train takers no longer needing tires.
Which is not to say that there is anything necessarily unseemly about these donations either. Transportation ballot initiatives represent interest group politics in their rawest form, pitting suburban drivers (and sometimes urban bus riders) against city rail riders, downtown property owners, and anyone who stands a chance of landing a construction contract on the coming project.
Rather than portraying Nashville's transit fight for what it really was, however, The New York Times chose instead to craft an unsupported and unconvincing narrative about shadowy billionaires pursuing a vague financial interest.
The post <em>New York Times</em> Goes Off the Rails With Claims About Secret Koch Plot to Kill Public Transit appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, by Nancy MacLean, Viking, 334 pages, $28
The board of education in Brown v. Board of Education—the 1954 Supreme Court decision that desegregated American public schools—was located in Topeka, Kansas, a city that was overwhelmingly white. Brown overturned a policy set by a majority, and it was right to do so: School segregation is just as wrong when it is imposed democratically as it is when it is imposed by suppressing the black vote.
So the strangest thing about Democracy in Chains—a book that contains many, many strange claims—may be how its author, the Duke historian Nancy MacLean, treats Brown. On one hand, she believes that those who want to bind majorities with preset constitutional rules are up to something sinister. Her chief villain on this score is James Buchanan, an economist and political philosopher who argued that government actors ought to be subject to built-in structural constraints. On the other hand, MacLean clearly thinks Brown was correctly decided. Indeed, she accuses Buchanan of working to undermine the ruling.
MacLean seems not to notice Brown is itself an example of the phenomenon MacLean is denouncing: a Constitution being used to overrule a democratic outcome in the name of protecting a minority.
It's an awkward start for a baroque conspiracy story, and it signals what a mess the book will be. The historian has little to no evidence for her history. She invents some when necessary, and will at times just make assertions to suit her narrative, mustering neither real nor phony evidence to back them up. Many of her factual and interpretive errors have already been covered elsewhere, in venues ranging from Vox to The Washington Post. Rather than get lost in the weeds of covering every false statement or misleadingly gerrymandered quotation in this book, I want to focus here on the core claims that it gets wrong:
MacLean fundamentally misunderstands Buchanan's intellectual project, treating his theories about politics as an apologia for the wealthy and powerful. This gives short shrift to a serious body of thought, and it fails to see that his arguments can indict the wealthy as much as anyone else.
She tries to tie Buchanan's work to the segregationist order in the South, even implying that his ideas arose from a desire to preserve it. She essentially invents links along the way.
She paints Buchanan as an important influence on Augusto Pinochet's repressive dictatorship in Chile. Not only does her evidence fail to support this, but she misses an important piece of counterevidence: a 1981 speech, delivered in Chile, in which Buchanan condemned dictatorial rule.
And finally, though Buchanan was neither an orthodox libertarian nor a central influence on the libertarian movement, she puts him at the heart of a Charles Koch–driven conspiracy to impose a radical libertarian agenda on the United States. In the process, she manages to misread both Buchanan and Koch in telling ways.
Public Choice, Private Greed?
Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for his role in founding the "public choice" school of economics. This school's key idea, to quote the Nobel committee, was to seek "explanations for political behavior that resemble those used to analyze behavior on markets." The result was a body of work in which politicians and bureaucrats, no less than entrepreneurs and investors, often "act out of self-interest," driven not just by a vision of the common good but by a desire for votes or bigger budgets.
MacLean, by contrast, treats public choice as little more than an effort to question the good-heartedness of public servants. Its conclusions, she insists, have "no true research—no facts—to support them" and are rooted in "projecting unseemly motives onto strangers about whom they knew nothing." She takes it for granted that when public choice economists complain that special-interest groups profit from government, they're aiming to protect the rich from the poor; it never seems to occur to her that the interests who play this game successfully are much more likely to look like Boeing, General Electric, or Archer Daniels Midland than, say, the National Welfare Rights Organization.
Her accusation that there is "no research" in public choice also falls flat. While Buchanan's own work tended more toward pure philosophy, the tradition he launched in fact has produced decades of empirical work, much of it in the journal Public Choice.
The Nobel committee also pointed to Buchanan's "principle of unanimity," which led him to try to imagine the constitutional rules that all citizens could, should, or would unanimously agree to. Rather than marking him as a tool of moneyed interests, this makes him resemble the man who may be the most influential political philosopher among modern liberals, John Rawls. Needless to say, Rawls and Buchanan differed on what rules would lead to a just, universally agreed-upon constitutional structure. But the two men recognized that they were working on similar projects, and they debated their differences collegially and without imputations of villainy.
None of this comes through in MacLean's critique. Whenever she seems to be condemning Buchanan's method, she is actually attacking his policy conclusions. That's how she's able to both praise Brown and condemn restrictions on majoritarianism without any glimmer that Brown itself restricts majority rule.
Vouchers and Segregation
There are, to be clear, good reasons to criticize some segments of the libertarian community for how they acted in the aftermath of Brown. Consider (as MacLean does for many pages) the Richmond-based conservative journalist James Kilpatrick, who tried to justify segregation after Brown by arguing that the states should have power to "interpose" (that is, nullify) the ruling. It is true, and shameful, that the Volker Fund—a foundation that supported libertarian organizations and scholars, including Buchanan—also promoted and distributed The Sovereign States, Kilpatrick's racist 1957 book on the topic. When the libertarian magazine The Freeman covered Kilpatrick's book, its reviewer endorsed his arguments about federalism while pretty much ignoring any questions about black citizens' rights to equal treatment.
More broadly, many Southerners of the era who thought of themselves as staunch enemies of big government were also racist, or at the very least didn't consider blacks' civil rights a particularly important issue. MacLean doesn't mention it, but many Southerners who supported big government were also racist, or at the very least didn't consider blacks' civil rights a particularly important issue. Segregationist politicians were often staunch New Dealers, a fact that does not mean the New Deal was racist at its roots or that anyone who advocates New Deal–style programs is tainted with this original sin. Some intellectual traditions are deeply rooted in racism; others have elements that absorbed some of the racist atmosphere that everyone was moving in. If you're writing intellectual history set in Jim Crow–era America, you need to be able to distinguish one from the other.
Instead, MacLean more or less invents the idea that Buchanan derived his constitutional ideas from bigots, notably the 19th century Vice President John Calhoun. Both Buchanan and Calhoun, after all, believed that majoritarian rule should be constitutionally restricted, and she attributed to both the motive of wanting to protect the propertied from the huddled masses. But considering the long list of other people who have argued for a republic restricted in its powers, it is difficult to avoid the idea that MacLean zeroed in on Calhoun—someone who Buchanan literally never once mentioned in any of his voluminous writings—as the supposed founder of Buchanan's constitutionalist tradition solely because Calhoun was a notorious white supremacist.
Similarly, in a single short passage in his memoir, Buchanan mentions the Southern Agrarian writers as fellow appreciators of a yeoman farmer's life, even while acknowledging that this personal preference was somewhat at odds with his admiration for the market order.
MacLean thinks this sufficient evidence to declare that one of the Agrarians, Donald Davidson—a man never mentioned in anything Buchanan wrote—"seemed most decisive in Buchanan's intellectual system," linking him to a vision that, in MacLean's words, "was racially exclusive" and dedicated to "the highly strategic demeaning of African-Americans."
Given the absence of references to Calhoun in Buchanan's own work, it borders on historical malpractice to make him and segregation the launching point of her story, taking up around the first 76 pages of her book. Some of MacLean's defenders have slyly stressed that Democracy in Chains includes no sentence explicitly declaring that racism drove James Buchanan to develop his limited-government vision. But the implications are clear.
We may be sure MacLean told us every racially insensitive thing she found in Buchanan's writing. If we choose to trust her interpretation of documents that the reader can't inspect—not necessarily a wise approach, since she is manifestly unreliable with many documents that the reader can—she has found a few things that would harm the reputation of anyone who said or wrote them today. These include a letter from Buchanan to a colleague that claims a college with "very few blacks in evidence" was "more orderly" than one with more.
Buchanan may well have picked up some of the prejudices common among Virginia whites of his generation. But there are also reasons to think he may have shed them, or at least that they did not determine his political positions. In 1965, when segregationist sentiments were still strong in his state, he brought to the University of Virginia as a guest lecturer W.H. Hutt, a prominent critic of South African apartheid who pointed out the similarities between apartheid and Southern treatment of blacks.
At any rate, given that it takes up a third of her book, MacLean seems to think that how Buchanan participated in the 1950s segregation debate is of formational importance to his intellectual project. She reports that he avoided a full-throated public attack on Jim Crow and that he showed no signs of being specifically concerned with its injustices. Instead, he co-wrote a 1959 academic paper (which was excerpted in Virginia newspapers) advocating education vouchers.
That essay does not directly address race, aside from a pro forma statement that the authors were against both forced segregation and forced integration. As a believer in the merits and powers of free markets, Buchanan and his co-author wrote that they saw a system of state-funded but privately provided education as one that would give "every parent…a vote in the market place and have it count," which they thought would lead private providers to "try to make better schools."
In 1960 a voucher-like system was adopted in Virginia's Prince Edward County, after the authorities there decided to stop operating any schools at all rather than run integrated ones. Instead they would offer kids tuition grants, theoretically without regard to race. According to a 2003 Indiana Law Review article, "In order to provide education for the white children, the Prince Edward School Foundation was formed. The Foundation built its own school and started operation when the public schools were closed. While an offer was made to set up private schools for the black school children, this was rejected by the African-American community which preferred litigation."
For MacLean, this suggests that small-government ideas such as education vouchers are little more than stealth support for segregation. She writes that Buchanan "remained mute" about the period when blacks in Prince Edward essentially received no publicly funded education.
Was Buchanan happy to see black students get no formal schooling? Or did he think—in line with his overarching belief that free markets would tend to meet most human needs, especially with demand financed by state tuition grants—that black children would ultimately get better service as paying customers of new private schools than as a class considered a contemptible nuisance in the old public ones? Or did he not consider the question at all?
The documentary record that I've seen doesn't settle this issue. But it's telling that MacLean doesn't for a moment consider that a staunch free market economist might have genuinely believed a free market might work to meet black children's educational needs in the long run, as he precisely stated in his 1959 paper, even if that view proved naive in the specific short-term realities of Prince Edward County. She's more dedicated to indicting Buchanan than to understanding the implications of his ideas from his own perspective. (Her readers would also likely be surprised to learn that Buchanan believed government has an obligation to fund children's education, set standards for schools, and compel attendance at them.)
Dictating Freedom
One of this book's central contentions is that libertarians want to enchain democracy because they know they could never pass their policies democratically. Hence, MacLean's interest in Pinochet's dictatorship in Chile, which embraced both violent repression and a degree of market-oriented economic reforms. MacLean thinks she has found Buchanan's fingerprints on some ugly parts of the constitution the country adopted in 1980, about midway through Pinochet's reign.
The evidence here is some correspondence between Buchanan and Chileans regarding five meetings he had that year with that nation's minister of finance and representatives from a Chilean business school. MacLean does an interesting, if confusing, sleight of hand here. She discusses the usual Buchananite free market ideas that he suggested the Chileans consider for their new constitution. (Some of these—a balanced-budget requirement, de jure independence for the central bank—did make it in.) She then segues to aspects of the eventual constitution that cemented Pinochet's power and tyrannically restricted political participation, without giving proof that Buchanan suggested any of them. (There is no reason to believe he did.)
MacLean's book was doubtless finished before she could digest the lengthy account of Buchanan's dealings with Chile that Andrew Farrant and Vlad Tarko presented at a March 2017 meeting of the Public Choice Society, but readers who care to understand the meaning of Buchanan's actions in Chile should be interested in it. The two economists analyzed a speech about democracy that Buchanan gave at a 1981 Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Viña del Mar—a speech that had never been published in English.
Farrant and Tarko found that "Buchanan publicly upbraided those [Mont Pelerin] colleagues who appeared to favor military dictatorship" in Chile. The newspaper El Mercurio reported that Buchanan had spoken at the meeting about "the moral obligation that we have as people who love freedom to look for ways of improving democracy without falling into the naive belief that dictatorships are the only or the best way of establishing a free economy." Analyzing his speech within the context of Buchanan's views about how social decisions are best made, Farrant and Tarko show that he advocated universal suffrage in Chile and opposed, in Buchanan's own words, "any form of government by an elite, whether…an aristocracy…hereditary monarchy…ruling class, or ruling committee."
Buchanan's opinion of dictatorship, expressed publicly on a dictatorship's own soil, turns out to be the exact reverse of MacLean's contention.
Uncovering the Imaginary Conspiracy
MacLean conjures false drama from how, while researching the history of vouchers in Virginia but barely having heard of Buchanan, she entered the economist's office after his death. She riffled through his papers, she writes, "catching my breath" at "the historical trail" that libertarian conspirators "left unguarded" by failing to "lock one crucial door."
That shivery sense of drama doesn't pay off. Very little in MacLean's story derives from that archive. At one point, she describes a 1973 memo Buchanan wrote skylarking about a "Third Century Project" that would "create, support, and activate an effective counterintelligentsia" for free market ideas. As far as any available evidence shows, the sole effect of this document was a single meeting at Buchanan's mountain cabin; beyond that, I've seen no reason to believe the project ever actually existed.
Neither, apparently, has MacLean. She devotes seven pages to it anyway, because it buttresses her sense that prominent public intellectuals' decades-long work for smaller government can better be seen as a secret conspiracy.
But her most highly contestable conspiracy claim is the portrait of Buchanan as the hidden inspiration for a policy machine managed by the billionaire oil industrialist Charles Koch, beginning in the 1990s.
There's a lot wrong with this story. Buchanan's political stances weren't always the same as most modern libertarians'. (One example, which complicates MacLean's picture of him as a handmaiden to plutocrats, is that he believed in a confiscatory inheritance tax for large fortunes.) He's also way down the list of thinkers to have a direct influence on most libertarian activists, having produced no work specifically aimed at, or even easily digestible by, people outside his fields. If anything, he's likely to have inspired libertarian-leaning academics in economics or political philosophy, not politicos.
Koch money did indeed support institutions and programs that Buchanan was involved in (as it has many thinkers and institutions that push libertarian ideas, including—full disclosure—Reason). But to justify the pretense that Buchanan has some heretofore unrevealed significance that MacLean alone has uncovered, she leaps way beyond that rather unremarkable connection. In the 1990s, she claims, Buchanan's ideas shifted Koch's entire approach to activism. But the story she tells at length about the two men does not support this conclusion. Indeed, it actively undermines it.
In 1998, Koch money helped set up at a consolidated center for various pre-existing free market groups at George Mason University, where Buchanan had already been teaching for many years. This new institution was dubbed the James Buchanan Center for Political Economy. Buchanan, in MacLean's telling, quickly became annoyed with the center's fundraising style, which he apparently saw as overly political. After butting heads with other figures in the Koch orbit, he walked away from the project, and the "alliance" fell apart almost instantly.
Of course, Buchanan's ideas can still influence Koch even if the two aren't getting along. But MacLean provides no specific analysis showing that some idea uniquely attributable to the economist—as opposed to ordinary free market libertarianism—suddenly appeared in Koch-funded organizations around this time. Her actual evidence for Buchanan's supposedly central role is wafer thin. It consists entirely of some things Koch said in "Creating a Science of Liberty," a speech he gave at a 1997 Institute for Humane Studies research colloquium.
For MacLean, this talk proves that Koch found in Buchanan's work "the set of ideas he had been seeking for at least a quarter century…the missing tool he had been searching for, the one that would produce 'real world' results." Summarizing the speech, MacLean writes: "James Buchanan's theory and implementation strategies were the right 'technology,' to use Koch's favored phrase. But the professor's team had not employed the tools forcefully enough to 'create winning strategies.'"
The full speech makes it abundantly clear that Koch did not say or even imply what MacLean has him saying. The "technology" to "create winning strategies" that Koch spoke of is not public choice or anything else related to Buchanan. It was "market-based management," Koch's philosophy of applying incentives and knowledge-seeking processes to his business and philanthropic endeavors.
Indeed, the speech that supposedly marks Koch's adoption of Buchanan as his guru reveals that the actual fresh influence moving Koch in the late '90s was Michael Polanyi, a scientist and social philosopher whose ideas are beyond the scope of this review except to note that he (a) isn't James Buchanan and (b) isn't mentioned by MacLean at all.
Buchanan's name comes up exactly twice in the speech, once because he had spoken the previous day at the same colloquium, neither even hinting that Koch had suddenly embraced Buchananism as his new tool. That whole key part of MacLean's narrative, her connection of Buchanan with everything the Koch network has been doing in the 21st century, is pure invention.
With the same casual disregard for scholarly integrity, she uses this same speech to suggest that Koch had decided that "the American people would not support their plans, so to win they had to work behind the scenes, using a covert strategy." Those 22 words are MacLean's gloss—in her word, a "translation"—of this line from Koch's speech: "The failure to use our superior technology ensures failure."
Nothing in either that quote or its unquoted context makes her summation in any way a "translation" of what Koch said. He was telling his colleagues to use market-based management and the "science of liberty" to more effectively create social change. It had zero to do with a "covert strategy," or with Buchanan.
The Libertarian Lesson
To sum up: In this curious book, MacLean's emphases are often irrelevant to her ostensible topic, and they frequently serve only to smear. Her reading of her sources is hostile and tendentious to the point of pure error. The historical story she claims to have uncovered—that Buchanan and his ideas are the secret, conspiratorial core of Charles Koch's political activity—is a product of her imagination. She is a startlingly bad historian.
But her book still has an important lesson to tell. Remember that MacLean's critique of using the Constitution to "enchain" majorities is purely situational: She's happy to endorse a ruling like Brown, where constitutional limits lead to an outcome she likes. Once you realize this, it becomes clear that what alienates her from Buchanan is something that unambiguously can be found in his work: ideas that might "reduce the authority and reach of government" and "diminish the power and standing of those calling on government…to provide for them in one way or another." This is anathema to MacLean, and in that way she represents a significant swath of progressive opinion, which sees libertarians' opposition to the redistributive state as a sin that condemns them as enemies of the people.
How big is MacLean's constituency? Look at the positive reception her book has received in many pop outlets of the left. Despite its abundant flaws of interpretation and storytelling, Democracy in Chains has been lauded in quarters that don't know much about Buchanan or libertarianism, from National Public Radio to Oprah Winfrey's O magazine.
For this portion of the progressive milieu, it hardly matters that libertarians frequently fight for public policies that would largely benefit minorities and the poor, including criminal justice reform, occupational licensing reform, ending the drug war, easing up on immigration enforcement, stopping corporate welfare, and curbing overseas wars. Those battles play no part in MacLean's story. She insists instead that libertarianism is little more than a conspiracy seeking "a return to oligarchy…in which both economic and effective political power are to be concentrated in the hands of a few."
For progressives of the MacLean school, it's not enough even to embrace the mild redistributionism that mixes libertarian policies with a limited welfare state. A range of figures have done that, and one of them—what do you know?—was James Buchanan, who was satisfied with government wealth transfers as long as they operated by general rules and treated everyone equally. For MacLean, he's still an enemy of the people for daring to call for limiting the government's ability to do the things she'd like the government to do. At which point anything, apparently, is fair game in attacking him.
If you too want to put such limits on state power, you owe MacLean and her enthusiasts a strange debt of gratitude. They've shown you your position in the public discourse with unnerving clarity.
The post The Great James Buchanan Conspiracy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>David Koch, himself a former Libertarian vice presidential candidate in 1980, industrial billionaire and political philanthropist (who is on the board of the Reason Foundation, which owns this publication), was reported this morning by The Daily Caller to be considering spending tens of millions to support the Libertarian campaign of former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson should he be the Libertarian Party's nominee.
Shortly thereafter, Johnson denied the report to CBS News:
"We have no knowledge of it," Johnson told CBS News when asked about the report, which first appeared on The Daily Caller, a conservative news site. "None whatsoever."
"You just got to laugh," Johnson added, chuckling.
When I talked to Johnson about money on Monday, he said that he sees about $50 million as the minimum necessary to really push Libertarian campaigning to an effective next level. Were the Koch story to be true, that would have been of great help toward that goal.
For now, Johnson's campaign's official comment on the Koch story: "We won't comment specifically on those who may or may not be considering lending support to Gov. Johnson. We are hearing from a wide range of groups and individuals who are interested in the Governor and our campaign." This should be considered in the context of Johnson's more direct comments to CBS.
This news, during the brief period before Johnson contradicted it, seemed as if it could harm the chances of Johnson's major competitors: movement activist and former Fox Business News producer Austin Petersen, and antivirus software magnate John McAfee. McAfee said in an email this morning, prior to Johnson's denial, that he had "nothing to add to the news."
Johnson in 2012 spent over $4 million on his campaign, though Libertarian Party member George Phillies** in a detailed critique of the campaign's spending calculates only about 20 percent of it was spent on what he categorizes as "outreach."
Austin Petersen, who has been critical of what he and others see as an overly large percentage of Johnson's last campaign money going to staff vs. actual politicking or advertising as per Phillies' analysis, replied in an IM interview (again, prior to Johnson's denial of the story) that:
If 150 million was what it took to win an election, Mitt Romney would be president right now. All the Koch money in the world won't make a Christian vote for a man who wants to force them to associate against their beliefs. Money doesn't win elections. Values and ground game does. Also, considering Gary's spending habits, are we certain this money would be spent like it was last time? I'm certain that would be the case.
I've reached out to a spokeman for Koch for comment on the story, and gotten no reply yet. Will update post accordingly if I do.
UPDATE: A Koch spokesperson said in an emailed statement: "Reports that David Koch has pledged his support to Gary Johnson – or any candidate running for president for that matter – are untrue."
**An earlier version of this post misspelled George Phillies name.
The post David Koch Reported to Be Intending to Put Big Money Behind Gary Johnson; Johnson Denies the Report; Austin Petersen Reacts [UPDATE: Koch Spokesperson Also Denies Report] appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last August, Jon Schwarz over at The Intercept wrote a piss-take about how if the dreaded Koch brothers* really cared about corporate welfare and criminal justice reform and intervention-skepticism, instead of just cynically using those issues to make their self-interested policy atrocities go down smoother, then they would be backing the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. "The alternative to taking the Koch brothers at their word," Schwarz wrote, "is to conclude that all the stuff they say that progressives love is just a scam — that when it's time to get out their checkbooks to put people in office, the only thing they actually care about is whether those politicians will make them richer."
This kind of binary gotcha game, in which there are forever only Doors #1 and #2, and politics always counts 100 times more than decades worth of philosophically based issue advocacy, is an almost-amusing attempt at enforcing tribal norms via cheap rhetorical entertainment. (Here's how easy it is: "The alternative to taking George Soros at his word about drug legalization, foreign policy overreach and the death penalty is to conclude that all the stuff he says that libertarians love is just a scam—or else he would have supported Ron Paul instead of Barack Obama.") Like almost everything about two-party presidential politics, such exercises are designed to erase ideological complications, sort people into clearly delineated camps, and make us all a little bit dumber.
Complicating such efforts today is a Washington Post op-ed from Charles Koch himself, in which he spends most of it exploring areas of commonality with—yes—Bernie Sanders. Excerpt:
The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.
I agree with him. […]
[T]he United States' next president must be willing to rethink decades of misguided policies enacted by both parties that are creating a permanent underclass.
Our criminal justice system, which is in dire need of reform, is another issue where the senator shares some of my concerns. Families and entire communities are being ripped apart by laws that unjustly destroy the lives of low-level and nonviolent offenders.
Koch goes on to explain how his policy solutions differ from those of Sanders ("History has proven that a bigger, more controlling, more complex and costlier federal government leaves the disadvantaged less likely to improve their lives"); points out that it's "results, not intentions" that matter, and closes with a passage that reads as much as anything else like a warning shot across the bow of Republicans:
When it comes to electing our next president, we should reward those candidates, Democrat or Republican, most committed to the principles of a free society. Those principles start with the right to live your life as you see fit as long as you don't infringe on the ability of others to do the same. They include equality before the law, free speech and free markets and treating people with dignity, respect and tolerance. In a society governed by such principles, people succeed by helping others improve their lives.
I don't expect to agree with every position a candidate holds, but all Americans deserve a president who, on balance, can demonstrate a commitment to a set of ideas and values that will lead to peace, civility and well-being rather than conflict, contempt and division. When such a candidate emerges, he or she will have my enthusiastic support.
Those last italics are mine, to underline the not-so-veiled slap at the remaining Republican field.
Now, this rhetorical olive branch hardly means that the Kochs are suddenly going to stop focusing their vast major-party-influencing efforts on the GOP, any more than George Soros will abandon the Democrats. (I have written on the commonalities between the opposing billionaires here and here.) But it does demonstrate anew that the strenuous effort to demonize them as ultra-conservatives are as reductionist and absurd as calling the Hungarian-born Soros a socialist.
And as importantly, the generosity toward Sanders from one of his biggest targets illustrates something that the dwindling number of partisan dead-enders cannot accept during the tribalist din of a presidential campaign: that it is possible, even probable, for individual Americans to find individual candidates from opposing parties to be the best in the field on certain important issues and the worst in the field on others, and that such collections of disparate judgments can make comparative evaluations challenging. Bernie Sanders is great on pot, lousy on higher education. Ted Cruz is decent on ethanol, indecent on subjecting Supreme Court nominees to a public vote because of gay marriage. Even the thoroughly awful Donald Trump makes a good point now and then.
The point of Olympic Year politics is to make you forget all of this. The point of living, as ever, lies elsewhere.
* David Koch is on the Board of Trustees of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason magazine and this website. Organizations connected with both brothers have donated money to the Foundation over the years.
The post Charles Koch's Friendly Letter to Bernie Sanders Complicates Campaign 2016's Effort to Make Us All Dumb appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week I noted that a New York Times review of Jane Mayer's new book about the Koch brothers included a highly selective description of the Libertarian Party platform on which David Koch (a Reason Foundation trustee) ran for vice president in 1980. That gloss seemed designed to elide any overlap between libertarian and progressive positions. In the latest issue of The New Yorker, Mayer herself does something similar.
The main thesis of Mayer's article is that the Kochs' support for criminal justice reform is part of a public relations campaign aimed at improving their reputation among moderates who view them as polluting plutocrats with no sympathy for the common man. Mayer undermines that thesis at several points, including these comments from environmentalist and criminal justice activist Van Jones:
In an interview, Jones defended his partnership with the Kochs on sentencing reform. "Everyone has his eyes wide open about the Kochs' politics and their ultimate agenda," he said. "But if you're sitting in prison right now you're not praying that the Koch brothers won't help." Jones believes that the Kochs' embrace of the issue is driven by their strong libertarian convictions. "It's not part of presenting the company in a new light," he told me. "It doesn't make sense to mix their criminal-justice-reform work with their corporate advertising. The Koch brothers have a despicable record on everything under the sun, from campaign finance to poisoning the planet, but they have been on this issue for years. Mass incarceration is the opposite of liberty and justice. There are very deeply held principles for both sides."
Mayer concedes that "Charles Koch has supported criminal-justice reform for decades," but she says that interest grew mainly out of his company's experience with pollution-related federal charges and was largely limited to white-collar crime until recently:
It is true that, at least as far back as 1980, when Charles Koch enlisted David, then a company executive, to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Libertarian Party ticket, the brothers have publicly supported radical reform of America's criminal-justice system. The platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 called for an end to all prosecutions of tax evaders and the abolition of a number of federal agencies whose regulations Koch Industries and other businesses have chafed at, including the E.P.A., the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and the Federal Election Commission, whose campaign-spending limits the brothers opposed. But the Kochs, as hard-line libertarians, have had goals quite different from those of many of their liberal allies. Their distaste for the American criminal-justice system is bound up in distrust of government and a preference for private enterprise. Until recently, the criminal-justice victims the Kochs focussed on were businessmen who had run afoul of the modern regulatory state—that is, people like them.
Even when Mayer is describing the Kochs' longstanding support for "radical reform of America's criminal-justice system," she omits details of the 1980 L.P. platform that fit that description but don't fit her portrait of the brothers as sympathetic only to "people like them." In addition to the planks Mayer chooses to mention, the L.P. in 1980 (as now) opposed "all laws prohibiting the production, sale, possession, or use of drugs"; "all laws regarding consensual sexual relations, including prostitution and solicitation"; and "all forms of government censorship, including anti-pornography laws." It championed "safeguards for the criminally accused" and decried the erosion of Fourth Amendment rights. The party also supported open borders and opposed crackdowns on unauthorized immigrants. Contrary to Mayer's spin, the primary beneficiaries of those positions are not rich white guys.
Mayer also notes that the Kochs' support for including a mens rea requirement in the definition of regulatory offenses that carry criminal penalties (a goal they say they are willing to drop if it endangers sentencing reform) has upset some of their allies on the left. But treating unintentional legal violations as crimes is unjust regardless of the defendant's race, occupation, or socioeconomic status. On this issue it is progressives who are being inconsistent because they have trouble sympathizing with people who are not like them.
The post Is the Kochs' Support for Criminal Justice Reform a P.R. Move? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In a New York Times review of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer's new book about the Koch brothers, CUNY historian David Nasaw notes that David Koch (a trustee of the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason.com and Reason magazine) was the Libertarian Party's vice presidential nominee in 1980. Nasaw sums up the party's platform this way:
The Libertarians opposed federal income and capital gains taxes. They called for the repeal of campaign finance laws; they favored the abolition of Medicaid and Medicare and advocated the abolition of Social Security and the elimination of the Federal Election Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. "The platform was, in short," Ms. Mayer concludes, "an effort to repeal virtually every major political reform passed during the 20th century."
There is nothing in this gloss to contradict or complicate Mayer's description of the Kochs (in the subtitle of her book) as part of "the Radical Right." Apparently they are conservative Republicans, only worse. Like other people who fear and/or loathe the Kochs (including Bernie Sanders), Nasaw simply ignores the inconvenient parts of the Libertarian Party's 1980 platform. Here are some of the planks he does not see fit to mention:
1. "the repeal of all laws prohibiting the production, sale, possession, or use of drugs";
2. "the repeal of all laws regarding consensual sexual relations, including prostitution and solicitation, and the cessation of state oppression and harassment of homosexual men and women";
3. "the repeal of all laws interfering with the right to commit suicide";
4. support for "the right of individuals to contract freely with practitioners of their choice, whether licensed by the government or not, for all health services," including abortion;
5. opposition to "preventive detention, so-called 'no-knock laws,' and all other measures which threaten individual rights";
6. "the repeal of all laws permitting involuntary psychiatric treatment";
7. opposition to "all forms of government censorship, including anti-pornography laws" and restrictions on broadcast "indecency";
8. opposition to "government harassment or obstruction of unconventional religious groups";
9. opposition to government perusal of private records held by third parties without (and maybe even with) a warrant;
10. "abolition of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation";
11. abolition of draft registration;
12. "the elimination of all restriction on immigration";
13. support for dramatic cuts to military spending and the withdrawal of American troops from foreign countries;
14. opposition to wars that are not authorized by Congress; and
15. support for "the principle of non-intervention," which entails "abstaining totally from foreign quarrels and imperialist adventures" while "recognizing the right to unrestricted trade, travel, and immigration."
A lot of this indeed radical, but it is not exactly right-wing, is it? In fact, many people on the left would be comfortable with most or even all of these planks, while self-identified progressives (perhaps including Mayer and Nasaw) would at least be sympathetic to the impulses behind them. But if you emphasize (or even note in passing) that David Koch ran for vice president on a platform that called for the legalization of drugs and prostitution, supported abortion rights, opposed legal discrimination based on sexual orientation, demanded big cuts to the defense budget and a less interventionist foreign policy, opposed all forms of censorship, defended the rights of the accused, decried crackdowns on unauthorized immigrants, and condemned invasions of privacy by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, you make him sound like some sort of hippie, as opposed to a crazy right-winger. More to the point, you make it much harder to demonize him and his brother among people who read The New York Times and The New Yorker.
The post Are the Koch Brothers Right-Wingers or Hippies? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Earlier this week NPR's Morning Edition reported a story in which ExxonMobil asked for an inquiry into the journalistic ethics of Columbia University students. The company is evidently annoyed by the Los Angeles Times story that they helped to research that claimed that the oil giant lied about what it knew about man-made global warming. Based in part on those stories, New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has issued subpoenas to the company with the aim of possibly suing it for failing to disclose to stockholders what it knew about the risks of climate change.
According to the NPR report, one major objection by the company was that the Los Angeles Times did not disclose to its readers that the Columbia University investigation on which its stories were based was supported by a foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which is advocating a shift away from fossil fuels. Now the Dean of the Columbia Journalism School Steve Coll has responded in a six page letter to the company's critiques. In his letter, Coll notes that the investigative project's Columbia University website does list its funders. But more interestingly, Coll argues:
ExxonMobil, as you note in the penultimate paragraph of your letter, has also supported projects at Columbia University. You therefore understand that the issue is not who provided funding for this or any Columbia University project, but whether the work done is independent of the funders. In short, did the journalism fellows and the Los Angeles Times editors on these stories follow the information uncovered by the reporting or did they follow the funders' agenda? The fact is that this reporting was not subject to any influence or control by the funders….
Of course, that's just as it should be. Nevertheless, some still practice "follow the money" when it comes to activities which they dislike and hope to thereby discredit. For example, a new study, "Corporate funding and ideological polarization about climate change," by Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Sciences researcher Justin Farrell got plenty of uncritical headlines when he claimed to have found that "organizations with corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated texts meant to polarize the climate change issue." By polarization, Farrell means that they question the scientific consensus that most recent global warming is man-made and will likely result in catastrophic future consequences.
Based on prior peer-reviewed research Farrell assembled a database of 164 organizations and 4,556 individuals that he deemed as "overtly producing and promoting skepticism and doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change." These include think tanks, foundations, trade associations, and grass roots lobbying firms. He then assembled a database of 40,785 texts dealing with climate change issued from these organizations between 1993 and 2013. Finally, Farrell then checked to see if any of these groups had received any amount of funding from either ExxonMobil or the Koch family foundations during that period. After "following the money" through his databases, Farrell concluded that "corporate funding influences the actual language and thematic content of polarizing discourse [about climate change]" and "that organizations that received corporate funding were more likely to have written and disseminated contrarian texts."
Sounds damning, right? Well, maybe not. Farrell more or less buries the lead in his research when at the end of his paper he acknowledges "a causal dilemma about whether corporate funding leads to increased production of discourse, or whether the organizations already creating discourse attracted corporate funding." He further notes that his analysis "revealed few discursive differences between organizations who received money before producing discourse (e.g., front groups) versus organizations that received it later (e.g., established think tanks)."
Put plainly, Farrell's analysis could not determine if opinion follows the money or if money follows the opinion. One reasonable interpretation of Farrell's work is that he has discovered the not-all-that-surprising fact that funders tend support researchers and groups that share their values and views. Hardly the stuff of anxious headlines. Dean Coll is right when he states that the "issue is not who provided funding…, but whether the work done is independent of the funders." Farrell's analysis cannot and does not address this question with regard to the groups who have been participating in the public debate over climate change. (In any case, I look forward to Farrell's research on the funding of corporations and foundations for groups who challenge the broad scientific consensus on the safety of biotech crops.)
Finally, one of the supposed 164 "climate contrarian" groups listed by Farrell includes the Reason Foundation which publishes this website. So in the interest of disclosure, I point to my 2006 Reason.com article, "Confessions of an Alleged ExxonMobil Whore" in which I explain how I changed my mind about the possible dangers of future man-made climate change. In addition, I note that the Reason Foundation hasn't received funding from ExxonMobil since 2006. David Koch is a member of Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees and the Charles Koch Charitable Foundation has supported Reason each year since 2013. Each year we publicly thank and publish the list of supporters who have given $1,000 or more to the Reason Foundation. The lists are published in Reason magazine, most recently in the June 2015 issue. We already know what Farrell has concluded about these disclosure, but readers are invited to make up their own minds.
Finally, I will note that there is a webathon going right now where those of you who share our values and views can also make "suspicious" contributions to the work of my excellent colleagues at Reason magazine.
Note: I will be reporting daily dispatches from the Paris climate change conference beginning next Monday.
The post Headline Shocker! Foundations and Corporations Support Groups That Share Their Values! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Charles Koch on reforming US drug laws
Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch is appearing on MSNBC's Morning Joe this morning, joined by his his brother David (a trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website).
MSNBC is rolling out clips at the Morning Joe site quickly. The clip above has Charles discussing the need to change drug laws and reform criminal justice. Other segments include his interest in ending cronyism and corporate welfare, David's philanthropy and run for vice president on the 1980 Libertarian Party ticket, and how George W. Bush's failed presidency (big spending, profligate regulations, awful foreign policy) goaded the brothers into the political arena. Charles at one point says our "foreign policy is insanity" in that we keep doing the same thing (interventions, propping up tyrants) and expect different outcomes.
Charles Koch has a new book out, Good Profit: How creating value for others built one of the world's most successful companies, which is the prompt for the interview.
In 2014, Reason interviewed, Mother Jones' Daniel Schulman, the author of Sons of Wichita, a biography of the brothers that was surprisingly even-handed and even sympathetic. Watch that here:
The post Charles & David Koch on Morning Joe, Talking Capitalism, Politics, & More appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The venerable, doddering Time magazine ran a ridiculously misleading headline designed to make billionaire financier of conservative and libertarian causes Charles Koch seem like even more of a monster than they doubtless assume their audience already thinks he is. (Koch's brother David Koch is on the board of trustees of the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason.)
It read: "Charles Koch says U.S. can bomb its way to $100,000 salaries: Building bombs and using them is one way to growth, the billionaire suggests to allies."
What James Bond supervillainy he's up to, and right in front of Time reporters, it seems!
If you go to the story now, it has the less blatantly maligning hed: "Charles Koch Mocks Common Measure of Prosperity."
The URL still has the telling phrase "charles-koch-bomb-economy/"
But the story shows the author still didn't get the point. Koch comes from an intellectual background that many reporters don't have a clue about—movement libertarianism, via the likes of Robert LeFevre, F.A. Harper, and Murray Rothbard.
They actually had the temerity to question constitutive aspects of the modern state-academic axis, including, believe it or not, the mighty oracle of Gross National/Domestic Product.
A key aspect of the Rothbardian/modern Austrian critique was that counting government expenditures in GDP figures made them inherently misleading as any kind of measure of citizen well-being, since, in Rothbard's estimation, the very fact that government was spending it rather than any citizen of his own free well made its contribution to freely chosen well being dubious.
Rothbard even suggested subtracting government spending from private production for a truer measure of freely chosen well being.
It is from this perspective that Charles Koch was speaking in the presentation Time's Philip Eliott writes about, and Eliott doesn't seem to get it at all:
One way to get [to average American incomes of $100,000 annually]? Building and using more bombs, [Koch] jokingly told about 450 donors to the political network he backs.
"I think we can have growth rates in excess of 4%. When I'm talking about growth rates, I'm not talking about that GDP, which counts poison gas the same as it counts penicillin," the 79-year-old industrialist said, veering off his prepared remarks. "What a monstrous measure this is. If we make more bombs, the GDP goes up — particularly if we explode them."
His audience laughed, clearly getting the joke.
I don't know why the audience laughed, but it wasn't a joke. It was a very serious point about both a core defect in GDP, and a core defect with the state: it's the entity that takes money out of the productive economy to make bombs and intimidate and kill people or destroy valuable property with them.
That is, in a very Rothbardian locution, monstrous. It ain't a joke, Mr. Eliott.
"Maybe we make more bombs," he said, trailing off. "I'm just kidding. I won't go there."
That was a bit of dark humor, and likely it would have been better had he not indulged in it. Might have avoided that crummy headline which will doubtless haunt Facebook poster memes for an eternity despite Time changing it.
Koch was making the broader point that economic growth compounds from year to year. A modest gain early pays greater dividends later. To that end, Koch is trying to make 4% a target for growth.
Kind of, but the core of what Eliott was just discussing was a "broader point" about government's drag on the economy, the lie at the core of GDP measurements, yoked to a very vivid antiwar statement.
Both the author and the original headline writer did a yeoman's job in helping readers not understand any of that.
The post <em>Time</em> Smears Charles Koch in Headline; Changes Headline, Still Misses His Point appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I noted last week the disappointing take of the two prominent SuperPACS dedicated to promoting Rand Paul for president, with his SuperPAC total lagging behind nearly every other GOP candidate's.
This week the pre-existing Purple PAC (which supported Libertarian Party gubernatorial candidate Robert Sarvis of Virginia back in 2013) also came out for Rand Paul.
From an Associated Press report:
"There are some very wealthy libertarians out there, and they're all going to be hearing from me," said Ed Crane, president of one of the pro-Paul super PACs, called Purple PAC. "It's a strong potential base for Rand."
Politico reports Purple PAC's total pull so far as $1.2 million, from just four donors.
That expansion in PACs does not appreciably expand the actual number of megarich people spending big for Rand, since $1 million of Purple PAC's cash came from Jeff Yass (of Susquehanna Partners, a trading firm), the same Yass who also gave a million to an earlier Paul PAC, America's Liberty. That one, the first in the Paul super PAC field, is run by former Ron Paul campaign chieftain (and husband of one of Rand's nieces) Jesse Benton.
Purple PAC's Crane has a long history with both libertarian advocacy and politics. He co-founded the Cato Institute and ran it from its 1977 founding until 2012, after a prominent and nasty fight with other co-founder Charles Koch.
Crane was also a major player in two Libertarian Party presidential campaigns in 1976 and 1980. (Crane and his impact are discussed at length in my 2007 history of the American libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism.) Crane has largely eschewed public support for specific candidates since.
Politico reports today that Paul was invited to, but likely won't show up at, a confab sponsored by an umbrella group for Koch brothers' political philanthropy, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce. Some wonder at the wisdom of Paul declining to make a case for himself in front of what is surely one of the biggest concentrations of GOP moneybags accessible. Still:
Paul has not ruled out an appearance, said his campaign spokesman Sergio Gor. But he added "it will be difficult due to trips to Iowa and New Hampshire, the first GOP debate in Cleveland and the U.S. Senate being in session all during the same week."
Gor suggested that Paul's relationship with the Kochs and some of their top donors transcends the seminars. Paul "regularly works with both Charles and David Koch directly," Gor said. He cited his boss's support from active Koch network donors, including New Jersey businesswoman Frayda Levin, and he pointed out that Paul participates in events with Koch-backed groups, including Americans for Prosperity and Concerned Veterans for America, which is hosting an event featuring Paul in South Carolina this week.
Associated Press sums up what Purple PAC's entrance into the funding fray means for total Rand Paul money so far, five months ahead of voting:
Three super PACS supporting the libertarian-leaning Kentucky senator said they raised a combined $6 million through June 30. That's on top of the nearly $7 million that Paul's campaign reported pulling in between his April announcement and the end of last month.
The post Third Rand Paul-Supporting SuperPAC Arises, Run by Cato Institute Co-Founder Ed Crane appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On Thursday, American Bridge, which is a Democratic super-PAC founded by once-righty/now-lefty political attack dog David Brock, released a sneering online flier titled "The Koch Brothers' Criminal Justice Pump-Fake," attempting to dissuade gullible liberals from believing that the two most influential long-term funders of libertarian causes and organizations are really sincere with their latest efforts to roll back government overreach on criminal justice.
So, for instance, we learn such alleged facts as that the "Origins Of Koch Interest In Criminal Justice Reform" was "97 Indictments For Environmental Violations Prosecution Against Koch Industries," and that the "Purpose Of Koch Interest In Criminal Justice Reform" is "Good Press While Advancing Their Financial Interests." Boilerplate political demonization (with multiple links to Wonkette), none of it surprising to those who have followed the career of David Brock, or who have tracked mirror-image righty demonizations of philanthropist-turned-political-financier George Soros. Politics makes people stupid, etc.
But then the man bit the attack dog. Liberal groups who have collaborated with Koch organizations on criminal justice are snapping back at American Bridge. Buzzfeed has the details:
"I hope they hold onto that report and frame it," said Van Jones, a progressive organizer and former Obama administration official currently leading #Cut50, a prominent bipartisan criminal justice effort. "They can frame it right next to the picture of Obama signing a bill by Christmas and keep it as an object lesson in the downsides of division and also the incredible possibility in a democratic system for ideas to breakthrough."
It's a weird turn of events, but the unsurprising conclusion to the drug war collision course: progressives and libertarians, led by the Kochs, agree that the tough-on-crime policies of the 1980s and '90s need to change, from mandatory-minimum sentencing to the use of criminal records in hiring. President Obama even praised the Kochs this week, a week in which he commuted the life sentences of 46 drug offenders and advocates say big changes could really be coming. […]
For Democrats trying to get bills passed in Congress, the timing of the American Bridge attack was a head-scratcher. Progressives credit Koch-backed efforts inside the GOP with bringing old-school tough-on-crime Republicans to the bargaining table with advocates, seen as the key to getting a legislation done and sealing another part of Obama's legacy.
"It doesn't make much strategic sense," said one Obama administration ally. "Who fucking cares why they're doing it if Republicans can point to them when they're supporting reform?"
This dead-ender sleazebaggery is nothing new for American Bridge. Back in 2012, as former Reasoner Mike Riggs reminds us today, the group attacked Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) for—wait for it!—"oppos[ing] additional funding for anti-drug enforcement efforts," and also opposing "funds for high intensity drug program in 2000."
Fortunately, as Jacob Sullum pointed out this morning, criminal justice reform has so much bipartisan grassroots momentum right now that even Bill Clinton and Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) are getting on board.
(David Koch is a Reason Foundation trustee.)
The post Lefties Bash Lefty PAC for Bashing Kochs on Criminal Justice appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Measured purely in terms of philanthropic bang-for-the-buck, the $4.3 million that the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has spent since 2003 on promoting a nuclear deal between America and Iran has to be one of the greatest bargains in the history of political charity. That's true regardless of whether America and Iran ultimately reach a nuclear deal, and regardless of whether you are in favor of such a deal or oppose it.
The expenditure, exposed and detailed in a recent Bloomberg News article by Peter Waldman, amounts to less than the price of some two-bedroom apartments in Manhattan. It is a small fraction what Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent supporting Newt Gingrich's losing 2012 presidential campaign. Yet that sum has purchased a top item on President Obama's foreign policy agenda, a directional change in American foreign policy toward Iran.
The left often sees Republican policy in an oversimplified model of being bought and paid for by the Koch Brothers or the Adelsons. Similar philanthropy on the left—George Soros, for example—sometimes attracts scrutiny, but it seems to be less often. The Rockefeller Brothers Iran policy spending is a reminder that spending by left-leaning mega-foundations deserves watching carefully, without falling into the trap of a reverse version of the "Kochtopus" fantasy.
The sometimes malevolent influence of Rockefeller money is, in one way or another, the subject of several recent books and one that is about to come out.
In The Tyranny of Experts, an NYU economist, William Easterly, traces the loss of China to the Communists back to a Rockefeller Foundation-organized meeting at the Yale Club in Manhattan in February 1925. The Rockefeller Foundation-funded Institute of Pacific Relations pursued a top-down, technocratic model of development. Easterly faults the Rockefeller Foundation for "blindness to the Chinese as individuals," writing, "conspicuously missing in Rockefeller's discussion of China is any respect for the initiative and rights of the Chinese people themselves."
James Piereson's new book Shattered Consensus describes the Rockefeller Foundation, along with Ford, MacArthur, and Carnegie, as dwarfing conservative foundations in size, and pioneering a strategy of "advocacy philanthropy," "designed to bring about large change by circumventing the electoral process."
Even those on the Rockefeller payroll concede that results are sometimes mixed. Chef Dan Barber, in his book The Third Plate, quotes the Rockefeller family historian, Peter Johnson, describing the "green revolution" of super-productive wheat and rice crops developed by Rockefeller Foundation-funded scientist Norman Borlaug as "a classic case of unintended consequences." Barber credits the system of agriculture for saving a billion people from starvation—not bad!—but also blames it for being "disastrous for soil health," for accelerating urbanization, and for reducing crop diversity.
To be sure, Rockefeller philanthropy has done plenty of unalloyed good. In a recent column, I credited a 1958 report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for setting the goal of 5 percent economic growth that John Kennedy ran on in his 1960 presidential campaign, and that Jeb Bush is echoing with his 4 percent growth goal.
But the left-leaning foundations can do plenty of damage, too. The Ford Foundation, with $12 billion in assets, recently announced it will shift its grant-making to focus on inequality. It was an ironical move for a charity where executive compensation reaches into the seven figures.
I'd rather this money be given away by those who earned it—even to foundations that exist long enough for the executives to drift far away from the original donors' intentions—than it be taxed away by the government. The voluntary charitable sector is one of America's great strengths, and its contributions enrich our national conversation. But one needn't be a populist conspiracy theorist who sees the Koch Brothers "dark money" behind every small-government politician to suggest that when a non-profit foundation spends millions to change the federal government's foreign or domestic policy, the expenditure itself deserves some public attention.
The post Spending by Left-Leaning Mega-Foundations Deserves Equal Scrutiny appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lots of people sure hate the Koch brothers.
The Kochs get death threats like this: "If I had a chance to murder a Koch brother in cold blood, I would surely take it."
Jim Dean doesn't want to kill the Kochs, but he does want new laws to limit their influence. Dean's brother Howard was a Democratic presidential candidate, and Dean chairs a group called Democracy for America.
"Get money out of politics," Dean says on my show this week.
But Dean's not just unhappy because the Kochs have money to throw around. He doesn't like their politics.
"The Koch brothers are poster boys for everything that is wrong in politics because they spend so much," he says, and they have extreme goals like "getting rid of Social Security and environmental laws."
But they don't. They just think today's environmental laws go too far, and they want to save Social Security from going broke.
Dean says Social Security "has been one of the best social programs we've ever had." When I point out that it's unsustainable, he says, "The math works for another 20 years." Wow. 20 years.
If the Kochs' views were the same as George Soros', I don't think liberals like Dean would complain as much. But Dean claims he's no hypocrite.
"We don't like it when Democrats play the same game. Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago … is giving away taxpayer-owned assets in the city to big businesses whose principals funded his campaign."
It is disgusting when big shots use their money to get handouts from government—ethanol subsidies, limits on sugar imports, loan guarantees for Boeing or special deals from Rahm Emanuel. That's government helping well-connected rich people, handing them money that once belonged to taxpayers.
But the Kochs aren't like that. The brothers made their billions by growing their businesses. That's a good thing. That's real wealth creation, jobs for people and products people want.
The Kochs oppose subsidies, even for their own company. They'd get rid of them if everybody else would.
I should disclose that I've spent time with both David and Charles Koch. They've paid me to speak at a few of their events. I happily took the money and gave it to charities.
But anyone who understands libertarianism knows I'd agree with the Kochs even if I'd never met them. They are pro-immigration, anti-drug war. They want less defense spending. They got praised by Attorney General Eric Holder for their campaign to jail fewer people.
Why is the left so mad at them? It's definitely not because they're the only big spenders in politics.
During the last presidential election, it was reported that the Kochs spent $60 million. Tom Steyer, the big environmental activist, spent $70 million a few years later.
Yes, groups affiliated with the Kochs spent $400 million. But The Huffington Post reports that labor unions spent much more: $1.7 billion. Union spending dwarfs Koch spending.
I wish libertarians could just pay the government to shrink. But that's not going to happen soon.
The unions, unlike the Kochs, promote economic ignorance. They push rigid hiring rules, limits on firing lazy workers, "buy American" campaigns, taxes on imports and other ideas that stifle growth. They push inefficiency on a grand scale, and politicians usually go along.
But last month, I was surprised when New Jersey's governor, Chris Christie (R), vetoed a bill that would have required public contractors to buy American. He wrote, "these bills will simply drive up the price of doing business, and threaten job creation. Building economic walls around our state … will not improve the lives of our citizens." Right.
Christie is no libertarian, but maybe he attended an economic literacy seminar sponsored by the Kochs.
Since unions spend big to get politicians to outlaw smart, efficient business decisions, I'm glad when people like the Koch brothers come along to spread the message that government should spend less and get out of the way.
I wish the Kochs spent more on politics. They promote a message we don't hear often enough.
© Copyright 2015 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
Note: David H. Koch is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine and Reason.com.
The post Of Kochs and Unions appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That's the suggestion in this Tim Mak piece for The Daily Beast. Here's a fresh quote from the Democrats' favorite punching bag:
The militarization of police in particular is an issue the Koch brothers view as necessary to tackle and which they have spent years fighting, a spokesman said.
"We need to address issues such as overcriminalization, excessive and disproportionate sentencing, inadequate indigent defense that is inconsistent with the Sixth Amendment, and the militarization of police," Mark Holden, general counsel of Koch Industries Inc., told The Daily Beast. "We have deep respect for the moral dignity of each and every person and because of this, we've worked for decades to support those who defend the full range of individual rights."
Also quoted in the piece are Brian Doherty, Cato Institute criminal justice director Timothy Lynch, the ACLU's Kara Dansky, and me.
In the fab new print issue of Reason (see its Millennials sub-page here), my editor's note—currently available to print subscribers only!—talks about how the rise of the allegedly racist Tea Party has contributed to a criminal-justice reform moment that might just undo some of the worst civil rights abuses of the past 40 years.
Much more interesting than merely finding more fodder for "Team A good, Team B bad" is the reality that single-issue coalitions can and should spring up from all sorts of political sectors, with pissed-off citizens pushing recalcitrant politicians to undo some of America's most egregriously unjust policy errors. Why, someone should write a book about that!
As Brian Doherty told the Beast:
It is an issue in which there is overlap between liberal and libertarian concerns, yes, a chance for coalition building as long as both sides don't get injuriously punctilious about 'playing with the other side….Libertarians might hope it's a teaching moment, as you might say, about the dangers and nature of state power.
Reason on the militarization of police here.
The post Is the Left Playing Catch-up to the Hated Kochs on Police Militarization? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Sons of Wichita: Q&A with Daniel Schulman About His Koch Brothers' Biography," is an interview by Nick Gillespie and produced by Josh Swain. About 14:46.
Original release date was June 6, 2014 and original writeup is below:
President Barack Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) have called them out by name. On the broadly defined left, they are accused of controlling every aspect of the country's politics and business climate. They have been lampooned in bad movies and worse songs.
They are David and Charles Koch, the libertarian-leaning billionaires who are the subject of the new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, by Daniel Schulman.
"I think the one misconception that people have about [the Kochs] is that they are merely out there to line their pockets," says Schulman, a senior editor at Mother Jones.
In an account that is even-handed and well-researched (though far from uncritical), Schulman charts the brothers' central role in creating the modern libertarian movement and their principled opposition to subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare. He also details their criticism of conservative stances regarding many lifestyle issues and interventionist foreign policy. (Disclosure: David Koch is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.)
Schulman sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about Sons of Wichita, misconceptions about the Koch brothers, and whether American politics is gearing up for a showdown between the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in 2016.
Cameras by Todd Krainin and Joshua Swain. Edited by Swain.
About 15 minutes.
Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new videos go live.
Scroll down for HD, Flash, MP4, and MP3 versions.
For a fuller discussion of the Koch brothers' role in libertarianism and contemporary politics, read Gillespie's "Libertarianism 3.0: Koch and a Smile."
The post Sons of Wichita: Q&A with Daniel Schulman About His Koch Brothers' Biography appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>They are David and Charles Koch, the libertarian-leaning billionaires who are the subject of the new book Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty, by Daniel Schulman.
"I think the one misconception that people have about [the Kochs] is that they are merely out there to line their pockets," says Schulman, a senior editor at Mother Jones.
In an account that is even-handed and well-researched (though far from uncritical), Schulman charts the brothers' central role in creating the modern libertarian movement and their principled opposition to subsidies and other forms of corporate welfare. He also details their criticism of conservative stances regarding many lifestyle issues and interventionist foreign policy. (Disclosure: David Koch is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.)
Schulman sat down with Reason's Nick Gillespie to talk about Sons of Wichita, misconceptions about the Koch brothers, and whether American politics is gearing up for a showdown between the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) in 2016.
Cameras by Todd Krainin and Joshua Swain. Edited by Swain.
About 15 minutes.
Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to receive automatic notification when new videos go live.
Scroll down for HD, Flash, MP4, and MP3 versions.
For a fuller discussion of the Koch brothers' role in libertarianism and contemporary politics, read Gillespie's "Libertarianism 3.0: Koch and a Smile."
The post Sons of Wichita: Q&A with Daniel Schulman About His Koch Brothers' Biography appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As a libertarian, I'm always slow to tell people what they should do. But if you care about politics and the ultimately far more powerful cultural direction of these United States, the new book by Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty is mandatory reading.
Written by a senior editor for the lefty magazineMother Jones, the book is hugely revelatory, though not in a way that will please or flatter the conspiracy theories of Democrats, liberals, and progressives who vilify the Kansas-raised billionaires Charles and David Koch for fun and profit. Sons of Wichita chronicles the post-World War II transformation of a mid-size oil-and-ranching family business into the second-largest privately held company in the United States. From a straight business angle, it's riveting and illuminating not just about how Koch Industries—makers of "energy, food, building and agricultural materials…and…products [that] intersect every day with the lives of every American"—evolved over the past 60 years but also how the larger U.S. economy changed and globalized.
But what's far more interesting—and important to contemporary America—is the way in which Schulman documents the absolute seriousness with which Charles and David have always taken specifically libertarian ideas and their signal role in helping to create a "freedom movement" to counter what they have long seen as a more effective mix of educational, activist, and intellectual groups on the broadly defined left. By treating the Koch brothers' activities in critical but fair terms,Sons of Wichita points to what I like to think of as Libertarianism 3.0, a political and cultural development that, if successful, will not only frustrate the left but fundamentally alter the right by creating fusion between forces of social tolerance and fiscal responsibility.
"One misconception that's out there," Schulman told me in an interview, "is that these guys are merely out there to line their pockets. If you look at their beliefs in a consistent framework, Charles Koch has been talking about a lot of this [libertarian] stuff since the 1960s and 1970s. This didn't just happen during the Obama era. And if you look at it that way, you have to start to see these guys as outside the political villain-robber baron caricature."
In the interests of disclosure, I should note that David Koch is a trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.com and Reason.tv, of which I'm editor in chief. Back in 1993, I received a fellowship for around $3,500 from the Institute for Humane Studies, of which Charles Kochis a major benefactor; the grant helped me complete my Ph.D. in American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Imagine, if you will, a country in which government at every level spends less money and does fewer things (but does them more effectively), doles out fewer perks to special interests (from Wall Street banks to sports teams to homeowners), regulates fewer things across the board, engages in fewer wars and less domestic spying, and embraces things such as gay marriage, drug legalization, and immigration. If surveys showing record levels of Americans are worried that government is too powerful are accurate, libertarianism may well be on its way to becoming the new civic religion. That's partly out of necessity (no country can spend money it doesn't have forever) and partly out of intellectual shifts borne out of argumentation and world events.
Nick Gillespie interviews Daniel Schulman for Reason TV (story continues below video).
In a recent piece for The Washington Post, Schulman reminds readers that while the Koch brothers remain staunch opponents of Obamacare and government spending, "they are at odds with the conservative mainstream" and "were no fans of the Iraq war." As a young man, Charles was booted from the John Birch Society (which his father had helped to found) after publishing an anti-Vietnam War newspaper ad, and David told Politico of his support for gay marriage from the floor of the 2012 Republican National Convention. In the past year, the Charles Koch Institute cosponsored events with Buzzfeed about immigration reform (which angered many on the right) and with Mediaite about criminal justice reform.
The libertarian or "freedom movement" is a loose and baggy monster that includes the Libertarian Party; Ron Paul fans of all ages; Reason magazine subscribers; glad-handers at Cato Institute's free-lunch events in D.C.; Ayn Rand obsessives and Robert Heinlein buffs; the curmudgeons at Antiwar.com; most of the economics department at George Mason University and up to about one-third of all Nobel Prize winners in economics; the beautiful mad dreamers at The Free State Project; and many others. As with all movements, there's never a single nerve center or brain that controls everything. There's an endless amount of in-fighting among factions and Schulman does an excellent and even-handed job of reporting on all that. (For the definitive history of the movement, read myReason colleague Brian Doherty's Radicals for Capitalism.) On issues such as economic regulation, public spending, and taxes, libertarians tend to roll with the conservative right. On other issues—such as civil liberties, gay marriage, and drug legalization, we find more common ground with the progressive left.
Libertarianism 1.0 spans the 1960s and '70s. It was a time of building groups and having arguments that hammered out what it meant to be a libertarian as opposed to a liberal who grokked free trade or a conservative who was against the warfare state. The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in the early 1960s by a former Cornell economics professor to nurture libertarian-minded college students and would-be academics. The founder, F.A. Harper, was an important intellectual mentor to Charles Koch, who became a major donor to the group.Reason magazine started publishing in 1968, created by a Boston University student who disliked cops and hippies in equal measure and wanted to create a conversation pit for libertarian ideas, news, and commentary. The Age of Aquarius didn't end before The New York Times Magazine declared libertarianism to be "the new right credo" and the next big thing among students in a cover story co-written by future Wired magazine founder Louis Rossetto. The article described John Kennedy and Richard Nixon as differing types of statist "reactionaries."
The always-rumbling fault line between equally anti-communist conservatives and libertarians in the Bill Buckley's student group, Young Americans for Freedom, ruptured irrevocably over the Vietnam War at the 1969 YAF national convention (PDF), when the libertarian protesters burned their draft cards and were expelled as "lazy fairies," a play on laissez-faire. That was one of the events that gave rise to the Libertarian Party in 1971, whose platform called not only for an end to gender discrimination but equality for gays (virtually unthinkable among Democrats and Republicans at the time).
In 1977, Charles Koch was one of the co-founders of the Cato Institute—and, as Schulman puts it, "the organization's wallet." In a 1978 issue of Libertarian Review, Schulman writes, Charles "decried corporate leaders who preached 'freedom in voluntary economic activities,' but simultaneously called for 'the full force of the law against voluntary sexual or other personal activities.'" He didn't have patience for businessmen who railed against welfare for the poor while lobbying for subsidies and protectionist policies for their own bottom lines, either.
In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket, which pulled 1 percent of the popular vote on a platform that assailed Carter and Reagan in equal measures while calling for massively lower taxes and spending, the legalization of drugs and prostitution, and the abolition of virtually all government programs and agencies, including the FDA and the EPA along with the CIA and FBI. The campaign was explicitly informational and intended to preach the gospel of less interference in the boardroom and the bedroom. "The ideas are so persuasive," David said at the start of the campaign, "that once people hear about them they will be willing to accept them." Schulman notes that David listed "his vice presidential candidacy years later under 'proudest achievement' on an MIT alumni questionnaire."
Libertarianism 2.0 covers the past 30 years or so. By the early 1980s, the libertarian movement had established a distinct ideological identity, albeit one often ignored or put down by an older, square conservative movement that still considered libertarianism as a punky younger brother. On the left, libertarians were routinely dismissed as "Republicans who smoke pot." As they gained strength and acknowledgement, libertarians started more actively engaging in mainstream politics, especially by working within the Republican Party, which at least espoused similar rhetoric about limiting the size, scope, and spending of government (that Reagan and the GOP did nothing of the sort remains a sore point for libertarians). Bill Clinton's tax hikes, his attempt to put government-accessible "backdoors" into all computer and telecom equipment, his bid to regulate the fledgling Internet via The Communications Decency Act, and of course his proposed health-care plan in the early 1990s galvanized many libertarians against him. The occasional pro-freedom and futurist pronouncements by characters such as Newt Gingrich (who graced the cover ofWired in 1995 with the tag line "Friend and Foe") seemed to offer serious common ground between libertarians and the Republican Party.
By century's end, Al Gore's increasingly strident environmentalism had for libertarians fully trumped his full-throated early '90s defense of free trade while debating H. Ross Perot on Larry King Live. His leading role in giving his wife Tipper's Parents Music Resource Council a platform to push music labeling in Senate hearings was a real problem too. By contrast, George W. Bush's low-tax record in Texas and belief in a "humble" foreign policy sounded pretty good.
Yet Bush's subsequent record on spending, civil liberties, foreign policy, and bailouts underscored the longstanding libertarian conviction that most differences between the two major parties were cosmetic. Not only did Bush—who had six years with a Republican House and Senate—grow federal spending by more than 50 percent in real dollars, he massively increased the regulatory state like no one else had since the days of Richard Nixon. Consider this damning January 2009 summary of his record compiled by economist Veronique de Rug of the Mercator Center (a Koch-supported outfit, by the way):
The Bush team has spent more taxpayer money on issuing and enforcing regulations than any previous administration in U.S. history. Between fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009, outlays on regulatory activities, adjusted for inflation, increased from $26.4 billion to an estimated $42.7 billion, or 62 percent. By contrast, President Clinton increased real spending on regulatory activities by 31 percent, from $20.1 billion in 1993 to $26.4 billion in 2001.
About the only thing that could seem worse to libertarians was the prospect of a President Obama who not only readily signed on to Bush's TARP and auto bailouts but pledged to expand them, spend hundreds of billions of additional dollars on "stimulus," and then top it off with a nationalized health-care plan.
As Schulman writes, the Kochs already started organizing invite-only, heavily attacked (by the progressive blogosphere), and fully compliant-with-campaign-law meetings to raise money for political action starting in the Bush years, with an eye toward funding candidates and causes that would push for freer markets and less regulation, defeat Obama, sink his health-care reform plan, and push back against other aspects of the progressive Democratic economic and regulatory agenda.
Despite some electoral successes, these efforts have largely come a cropper, especially with the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012. Schulman writes that although David Koch ultimately became a major supporter of Romney, he withheld his "formal support" until New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie declined to run and Romney had dispatched his GOP rivals. He quotes a friend of Charles saying, "Charles loved the governor from New Mexico, Gary Johnson," who ran on the Libertarian ticket (and pulled more than 1 million votes and around 1 percent of the popular vote, the party's best showing since the 1980 ticket that featured David).
The Kochs' political network spent more than $400 million trying to unseat Barack Obama—the weakest, most vulnerable incumbent president in decades to win re-election. Their failure to do so didn't just create a dark night of the soul for the Republican Party, which pledged to do an official post-mortem and organizational reboot. It also, says Schulman, has energized the Koch brothers and their political operation to figure out where they failed to connect with the American people. And unlike the GOP, whose dedication to fundamental change went missing the minute Obama's popularity dipped after his second term began, the Kochs, Schulman told me, "really do learn from their mistakes. What you see right now is kind of the overhaul of their political operation."
Which brings me to Libertarianism 3.0. The first iteration of the modern libertarian movement was focused on figuring out who we were and what sorts of institutions and outreach were necessary for the movement. The second was about working within existing power structures, sometimes even to the point of keeping mum on matters of serious disagreement. I'd argue that Libertarianism 3.0 will be a phase in which libertarians pursue two parallel political paths.
The first is outlined in The Declaration of Independents, the book I co-authored with Matt Welch: As increasing numbers of Americans flee affiliation with either major party, libertarians and others will form ad hoc coalitions that focus on specific issues and then disband after a threat has been stared down. That happened in 2012, when a rag-tag group of people from all over the political spectrum teamed up to defeat The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart The Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Ralph Nader is calling for something similar in his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Right-Left Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. In a recent interview, Nader—no fan of major parties, he—told me that libertarians and progressives could get a "hell of a lot done if they would band together on specific issues" such as cronyism and corporate subsidies. (The problem, he said, is that "everyone wants to win every argument on the things they disagree about.")
The second strategy is relevant to those trying to work.within the Republican Party (and possibly the Democratic Party in time). They will startinsisting that their economic and social views not only get taken seriously but start driving the agenda. That's the strategy that Matt Kibbe, head of FreedomWorks, champions in books such as 2011's Hostile Takeover and this year's Don't Hurt People and Take Their Stuff.
It may well be the path that the Kochs are pursuing. There are signs that this is already happening. As Schulman writes, the Republican establishment has always had reservations about the Kochs, "who often aligned with the Republicans on free-market issues and downsizing government… [but] Republicans [couldn't] count on the Kochs to fall in step on issues such as immigration, civil liberties, or defense, where they held more liberal views. The brothers and their company also opposed subsidies across the board, a position GOP members didn't always share. 'The Republicans don't trust us,' said one Koch political operative."
But at this point, the GOP may need the Kochs—and the libertarian vote—more than they need the GOP. You don't have to be a savvy businessman to know that spending $400 million to lose a very winnable presidential election isn't a good use of money. If the Republican Party refuses to take libertarian ideas seriously, there's really nothing in it for libertarians to stick around.
There remains a serious question of whether or how far the Kochs will push for unambiguously libertarian positions as the price for their support. On economic issues, that will be daunting enough when you think about the massive growth in the size, scope, and spending of government under George W. Bush and a Republican Congress. Even now, the House Republican budget plan calls for increasing annual spending over the next decade from around $3.6 trillion to $5 trillion.
When it comes to the social issues the GOP refuses to stop talking about despite declining levels of support among voters, the Kochs' record of direct activism has never been strong. During the Libertarianism 2.0 phase, they supported libertarian groups such as Reason Foundation and Cato that call for drug legalization, marriage equality, open borders, and the like, but there's no question that they focused most of their literal and figurative political capital on economic issues that caused less stress among establishment Republicans.
"The brothers have traditionally avoided bankrolling advocacy on controversial social issues," Schulman writes in his Post op-ed, "but they would certainly throw a curveball to their opponents on the left (not to mention their supporters on the right) by actively backing the causes of marriage equality or reproductive rights."
The standard GOP response to unapologetic libertarianism is fear and dismissal: It's too whacked out, too radical, too scary. Yet the only branch of the Republican Party that isn't dead and withered is precisely the libertarian one. Retired Rep. Ron Paul (who ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988) packed college campuses with young kids and retirees with a vision of limited government, fed audits, and restrained foreign policy. If he fired up an enthusiasm that was never fully reflected in his vote totals, he also inspired a new generation of candidates and activists who want to be part of a major party. Whose heart flutters at the sight of John Boehner or Eric Cantor? While not necessarily doctrinaire libertarians, characters such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are not only pushing for defense spending and the NSA to be put on the chopping block, they are increasingly pushing for marriage and drug issues to be settled at the state level. Paul is consistently at the top of polls for 2016 presidential contenders.
Consider, too, the re-election campaign of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell is not running for another term like he used to. In 2008, McConnell ran ads touting the billions of dollars of pork he had brought home to Kentucky over the years. "That would never fly today," the former head of the Tea Party Express told Business Insider. In 2010, McConnell did everything he could to keep Rand Paul from becoming the junior senator from the Bluegrass State (Paul defeated McConnell's pick in the GOP primary). This time, McConnell worked overtime to secure an early endorsement from Paul. He even hired Paul's former campaign manager and supported a state bill championed by Rand Paul and Thomas Massie that legalized hemp production.
Nick Gillespie interviews Daniel Schulman for Reason TV (story continues below video).
In a poll from last fall (the most recent on the topic), Gallup found that "a majority, 53 percent, favor less government involvement in addressing the nation's problems in order to reduce taxes, while 13 percent favor more government involvement to address the nation's problems, and higher taxes."
That's a broadly libertarian point of view, and it's certainly one that comports with Schulman's analysis of the Koch brothers' political vision. And it may speak to their influence on setting the terms of the conversation as well. In this passage, Schulman is writing specifically about Charles, but the idea applies to David as well: "He has arguably done more than anyone else to promote free-market economics and the broader ideology surrounding it. By mainstreaming libertarianism, he helped to change the way people think."
Of course, it's far from clear whether the Republican Party—or the larger country—will actually embrace anything resembling a principled libertarian approach not only to economic matters but to foreign policy, civil liberties, social issues, and more. Regardless of the outcome, though, one of the reasons—not the only one, to be sure—we're even having this conversation is the Koch brothers. After eight disastrous years under George W. Bush and six (so far) under Barack Obama, it's a conversation that's been postponed long enough.
Note: This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast on May 30, 2014. Read it there.
The post Libertarianism 3.0; Koch And A Smile appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I've got a new piece up at The Daily Beast that talks about Daniel Schulman's brilliant new biography of Charles and David Koch, Sons of Wichita, the brothers' major role in fomenting the contemporary libertarian moment, and how those of us who believe in shrinking the size, scope, and spending of the government might shift the course of politics in 2014, 2016, and beyond. Snippets:
What's far more interesting—and important to contemporary America—is the way in which Schulman documents the absolute seriousness with which Charles and David have always taken specifically libertarian ideas and their signal role in helping to create a "freedom movement" to counter what they have long seen as a more effective mix of educational, activist, and intellectual groups on the broadly defined left. By treating the Koch brothers' activities in critical but fair terms,Sons of Wichita points to what I like to think of as Libertarianism 3.0, a political and cultural development that, if successful, will not only frustrate the left but fundamentally alter the right by creating fusion between forces of social tolerance and fiscal responsibility….
The standard GOP response to unapologetic libertarianism is fear and dismissal: It's too whacked out, too radical, too scary. Yet the only branch of the Republican Party that isn't dead and withered is precisely the libertarian one. Retired Rep. Ron Paul (who ran for president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988) packed college campuses with young kids and retirees with a vision of limited government, fed audits, and restrained foreign policy. If he fired up an enthusiasm that was never fully reflected in his vote totals, he also inspired a new generation of candidates and activists who want to be part of a major party. Whose heart flutters at the sight of John Boehner or Eric Cantor? While not necessarily doctrinaire libertarians, characters such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) are not only pushing for defense spending and the NSA to be put on the chopping block, they are increasingly pushing for marriage and drug issues to be settled at the state level. Paul is consistently at the top of polls for 2016 presidential contenders.
Disclosure:
David Koch is a trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason.com and Reason.tv, of which I'm editor in chief. Back in 1993, I received a fellowship for around $3,500 from the Institute for Humane Studies, of which Charles Koch is a major benefactor; the grant helped me complete my Ph.D. in American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
The post Libertarianism 3.0: The Koch Brothers, the GOP, and What Comes Next appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Author Nicholas Confessore brings up little that would even have been particularly interesting in 1980, much less now, past his opening paragraph that explains aspects of libertarianism that might confuse people who see the Kochs strictly as sinister right-wing oligarchs:
[David Koch as L.P. vice presidential candidate] backed the full legalization of abortion and the repeal of laws that criminalized drug use, prostitution and homosexuality. He attacked campaign donation limits and assailed the Republican star Ronald Reagan as a hypocrite who represented "no change whatsoever from Jimmy Carter and the Democrats."
Times researchers were trying to dig up footage of a David Koch speech from an L.P. event in 1979 for this story, saying the story was about the L.P., though it is really about the Kochs. The story does little to contextualize what that campaign meant, either then or now, has few voices to help either reporter or reader understand this strange world they are uncomfortable with, other than the blank voices of documents, among "thousands," that the Times rather fruitlessly dug through from the L.P.'s archives at the University of Virginia. (Deep historical reporting from from an actual archive! Sort of hidden, in a way! That they were "alerted" to, as the story itself honestly admits, by "American Bridge, a liberal political organization that has been critical of the Kochs," who must be very disappointed in the results.)
The headline is "Quixotic '80 Campaign Gave Birth to Kochs' Powerful Network." More accurate headlines might have been "Quixotic '80 Campaign Caused Kochs to Completely Shift Their Political Change Strategy" or "All-Powerful Political Manipulator Koch Brothers Couldn't Even Bend Tiny Third Party to Their Will for Long," as the Kochs and their lieutenants failed to get their man Earl Ravenal the L.P. nomination for 1984 and left the party in a huff. More depth—any depth—about the ways in which the Clark/Koch campaign was perceived at the time by some on the right as a left-wing takeover of the L.P., and by many of the more radical in the L.P. as a wan mainstreaming of a radical message to mere Kennedy-style "low-tax liberalism," might have educated their readers about this whole "Libertarian Party" thing a bit better.
To be fair to Confessore, it is true that that David Koch's run with the L.P. was at least the zenith in the Koch brothers' first foray into electoral politics after earlier ideological activism more of the Institute for Humane Studies variety in the early to mid-'70s—supporting scholarship and seminars on things like Austrian economics and the possibilities of anarchism, before Ed Crane (who co-founded the Cato Institute with Charles Koch, David's older brother, and helped run the Clark/Koch L.P. campaign) helped convince Charles that electoral politics could be fruitful for libertarian change. After all, the Kochs' earliest mentor in libertarianism was the stridently apolitical Robert LeFevre of the Freedom School who thought any sort of political action both immoral and useless.
I spent a week in that University of Virginia L.P. archive myself back in 1998 when I was researching my book Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. I dug back through my old notes today after reading the Times's story and felt a bit of pity for them: it isn't like they missed much interesting, but I suppose upon hearing there was this "unknown" archive with thousands of potentially Koch-damning documents in it, they had to keep going, and to dutifully write up the results, however unilluminating to fans or foes of the Kochs or the ideas they support.
I was however reminded today, going back through those notes of mine, of a couple of things I found amusing then: that the Times itself in writing on September 10, 1979, about the nominating convention for Koch and presidential candidate Ed Clark, seemed to have no idea at all who the Koch family was, referring to David not as part of any petrochemical or engineering company or as superwealthy but merely as a New York lawyer. Also, that David seemed to scrupulously expense back many of his campaign costs on the road to the party. (Although he was often in effect merely round-robin paying for them himself, with $2.1 million of the $3.5 million the campaign raised coming from him. Of course, the ability for him to self-finance his own campaign without running afoul of campaign finance law was entirely the reason Koch became the vice-presidential candidate.)
If one was trying to really study interesting shifts in the thoughts of the Kochs from their more explicitly libertarian movement days to their current role as power brokers in the Republican Party (rather than pretend in a headline as if they are all of a piece, as if those L.P. days "gave birth" to their current "powerful network"), you might look to another part of my book Radicals for Capitalism, in which I quoted from a roundtable in the May 1978 issue of none other than Reason magazine, where David's older brother Charles Koch said:
Our greatest strength is that our philosophy is a consistent world view and will appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people, particularly young people. But to realize that strength, we have to state it in a radical, pure form…the other side of that is our greatest weakness: that is, because we have a radical philosophy we don't appeal to people who are in positions of influence, people with status or wealth….So the temptation is, let's compromise…let's be much more gradual than we should be. As a result, we could destroy the appeal to the comers of the world, and therefore we destroy the movement.
The post David Koch Ran for Vice President with the Libertarian Party in 1980. <em>The New York Times</em> Thinks You Should Care, Isn't Sure Why. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Because why not, The Independents on Fox Business Network tonight at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT) in its fifth segment (or "E Block," as such things are known) will talk about either 1) President Barack Obama's proposed new National Security Agency regulations governing bulk data collection, or 2) the president's fretting about a nuke over New York. We will choose said topic based on how people vote in a poll on the show's Facebook page. Vote early and often!
Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores Inc., a suit over a for-profit corporation's desire to exempt itself from a contraceptive-pill mandate in Obamacare for religious reasons. Read Damon Root on the case here and here, and the Cato Institute's Ilya Shapiro here. Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz will be on to talk about the case and also the broader question of religious-liberty exceptions.
Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld yesterday told Fox News that "a trained ape" could do better than Obama in managing such foreign policy tasks as securing a status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan. Leading to the obvious follow-up question: Is that racist against George W. Bush? Joining to discuss are Party Panelists Julie Roginsky (Democratic Party strategist) and Ellis Henican (Newsday columnist), who will also weigh in on Capitol Hill's new "Hip-hop caucus," which intends to focus attention on the links between climate change and racism. Also up for discussion: the Democratic Party's hot strategy to demonize the Koch brothers. (David Koch sits on the Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees.)
Remember the Heritage Foundation kid in the "What's the Matter With Libertarians?" episode who tussled with Kennedy over gay marriage and polygamy? Well, Ryan Anderson is back for another round over government marriage-recognition and morality. And fast-talking founder & CEO Paul Rieckhoff of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America will be on to discuss the problem of veterans committing suicide, and the policy of reducing the number of U.S. military troops. Then comes the aftershow, which will be live-streamed at this website. Please send your tweets out to @IndependentsFBN; some may be used on air.
The post Tonight on <em>The Independents</em>: David Boaz on SCOTUS, Rumsfeld Goes Ape, Polygamy vs. Gay Marriage, Veterans and Suicide, Sexy Aftershow, and Vote on Our E-Block Topic! appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Reid was responding to comments from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who howled over President Barack Obama's crackdown on politically active tax-exempt organizations as "declaring a war not just on its opponents, but on free speech itself." McConnell compared the administration's proposed rules on those groups to the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of outside groups and said Democrats are trying to stifle their election-year critics.
(Note: David Koch is on the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website)
The post Harry Reid Says Koch Brothers Are Trying To 'Buy the Country' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Koch believes that Obamacare will increase deficits, lead to an overall lowering of the standard of health care and raise taxes," Philip Ellender, the company's chief spokesman, wrote in a letter to senators. "However, Koch has not taken a position on the legislative tactic of tying the continuing resolution to defunding Obamacare, nor have we lobbied on legislative programs defunding Obamacare."
The post Koch Brothers Deny Any Involvement in Pushing for Shutdown Due to Obamacare appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>I've argued elsewhere that signs of the emerging "libertarian era" are everywhere around us, both in the voluminous and ever-growing positive press adherents of "Free Minds and Free Markets" and the increasingly shrill and misinformed attacks are drawing.
The latest example of the latter is on glorious, semi-literate display in the amazingly awful "Libertarians Are the New Communists," by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu and posted at Bloomberg View.
It is less a fully formed op-ed and more the rough draft of a freshman composition scratched out after a long night out on the tiles.
The co-authors, who also penned a 2011 book called The Gardens of Democracy, assail a Dick Tracy-level Rogues Gallery of "nihilist, anti-state libertarians" including the Koch Brothers (natch), Sen. Ted Cruz (?), Grover Norquist, and Ron and Rand Paul. Ayn Rand's also part of the problem, of course.
Radical libertarianism assumes that humans are wired only to be selfish, when in fact cooperation is the height of human evolution. It assumes that societies are efficient mechanisms requiring no rules or enforcers, when, in fact, they are fragile ecosystems prone to collapse and easily overwhelmed by free-riders. And it is fanatically rigid in its insistence on a single solution to every problem: Roll back the state!
Curiously, you'd expect Hanauer and Liu to provide at least one quote—even taken out of context—in which any of the people they vilify call for actual anarchy or the total absence of government. Instead you get treated to such remedial-writing gems as
The public record of extreme statements by the likes of Cruz, Norquist and the Pauls speaks for itself.
Back in the days when I taught college composition, that's exactly the sort of line I'd circle with a note asking, "Examples?" But it's not suprising that the authors wouldn't bother quoting any of their targets, since none of them (to my knowledge anyway) espouse what is more commonly called anarchy. Indeed, it's a curious but little-appreciated fact that in the federal budget plan Rand Paul submitted for consideration earlier this year, he proposed spending about $38 trillion over the next 10 years (see page 96). What a odd thing for a nihilistic anarchist who yearns for an America that's more like Somalia—where "libertarianism finds its fullest actual expression"—to propose.
In their hurry to create an ideological pinata to bat around, Hanauer and Liu pause to acknowledge that "social libertarians"—folks who "support same-sex marriage or decry government surveillance" – aren't the problem. After all,
Reasonable people debate how best to regulate or how government can most effectively do its work—not whether to regulate at all or whether government should even exist….
It is one thing to oppose intrusive government surveillance or the overreach of federal programs. It is another to call for the evisceration of government itself.
Hmm, debating how government can most effectively do its work? Opposing intrusive government surveillance or the overreach of federal programs? That sounds like a pretty good definition of exactly what the Koch Brothers and the others mentioned above are doing.
Yes they want to "roll back the state"—Rand Paul's budget would lower federal spending as a percentage of GDP to around 16 percent over the next decade—but they seem to be pretty OK with its continued existence.
And I suspect that they would also agree that "cooperation" is central to human flourishing (what are markets if not crucibles of voluntary exchange?). I don't agree with every utterance by the Kochs (one of whom, David, sits on the board of trustees of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website), the Pauls, Ted Cruz, or Ayn Rand. But to miscast them so flagrantly—and in absentia—is not unfair, it's unpersuasive in the extreme.
Hanauer and Liu's mode of argument consists of repeating negative statements ("Radical libertarians would be great at destroying," they are "fanatically rigid," they are "economic royalists" who are "mirror images" of communists, etc.) and writing opponents out of serious discussion (libertarians are not "reasonable people," so there is no reason to actually represent their viewpoint even while attacking it).
If this sort of ultra-crude and unconvincing style of argument (communists=bad; libertarians=bad; thereore, communists=libertarians) is the best that opponents of libertarian influence and policy can do, our future is indeed bright.
The post "Libertarians are the New Communists." And Anti-Libertarians Are Out of Ideas. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Answers ranged from a fear of the Los Angeles Times being transformed into a right-wing propaganda machine to a general distrust of billionaires and/or large corporations owning media companies (despite the fact that the Tribune Company is, of course, a large corporation, and billionaires besides the Kochs are interested in the purchase).
About 4 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Tracy Oppenheimer.
Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel and receive automatic notifications when new material goes live.
(Full disclosure: David Koch is trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason TV. He was not involved in or consulted during the making of this video.)
The post Koch LA Times Buyout Enrages Protesters: What We Saw at the "Save Our News" Rally appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Protesters gathered outside of the Los Angeles Times building on Wednesday to speak out against the potential sale of the newspaper and other Tribune Company properties to the Koch brothers. Reason TV was on the scene to find out why the potential sale was so upsetting to those gathered and whether or not they though it appropriate for the city government to take action against the Times.
Watch the full video above or click the clink below for downloadable links and the full text.
About 4 minutes. Produced by Zach Weissmueller and Tracy Oppenheimer.
Subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel and receive automatic notification when new material goes live.
Full disclosure: David Koch is trustee of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes Reason TV.
The post Vid: Koch LA Times Buyout Enrages Protesters—What We Saw at the "Save Our News" Rally appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The labor/left/journalism axis has been continuing its agitation this week against a totally-rumored-at-this-point sale of the Tribune Co., which owns eight newspapers including the L.A. Times, to the libertarian businessmen/philanthropists and all-purpose right-wing bogeymen Charles and David Koch (the latter of whom sits on the Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees). Guest starring at one L.A. rally this week was none other than slide-guitar hero, Cuban-music anthropologist, and Reed College washout Ry Cooder. The LA Weekly sets the scene:
And then came Ry Cooder.
The roots musician and Santa Monica native opened by waving to the building that houses Oaktree [Capital Management, which owns a reported 23 percent of Tribune]. "I just want to say hello to Dave and Charlie," he called. "Here's to your destruction."
The song he sang was an old union song, "I Don't Want Your Millions, Mister" complete with Koch-inspired lyrics.
You may find it odd that an aging musician would be so energized in opposition to a newspaper-company sale, but it turns out that Cooder has an actual mini-discography devoted to the Kochs. Here, for example, is a ditty called "Brother Is Gone," in which Charlie and David meet Satan by the side of the road in Wichita, Kansas:
Read the lyrics here, including this strained stanza:
Oil spills and cancer towns was our steppin' stones
Immigration bills and foreclosure homes
States' rights we proclaimed like in the good old Jim Crow days
Our highest aim was to take your vote away
Who has the heart to tell Cooder that the Kochs—unlike the L.A. Times editorial board—are totally on his side regarding eminent domain abuse?
Previous writing on the Koch/Tribune rumors here.
The post Ry Cooder Seeks 'Destruction' of Koch Brothers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Are all journalists, or at least all former L.A. Times employees, apoplectic at the thought of Charles and David Koch buying the eight newspapers of the Tribune Co.? Nope!
Over at Zócalo Public Square, former Timesman Joe Mathews writes a potentially friendship-straining piece titled "I Hope the Kochs Buy the Times." Excerpt:
To be vital, papers must do more than serve a community; they must engage it. Papers should have public faces and publish things that the public loves—or loves to hate. Unfortunately, most American newspapers today are owned by little-known rich people or faceless corporations, and it's rare that papers do things that people love or hate. The L.A. Times, while still among the best in the country, suffers from this same malady: It's unthreatening and predictable.
Enter the Kochs. Simply by expressing interest in buying the Times, the billionaire brothers have made the paper a topic of conversation and community concern in a way that the paper's own content can't match. If just the possibility of Koch ownership has prompted so much talk about how to protect the paper as a community enterprise, just imagine if the Kochs actually bought it. […]
Indeed, you could make the case that the Kochs would be the best owners the Times has ever had. The Chandler family, with the important exceptions of Otis and his mother Buffy, was more right-wing, and far less public-spirited, than the Kochs. The Tribune Company, which came next, presided over a decimation of the paper. Sam Zell, the most recent owner, piled up so much debt in buying the Tribune that his purchase effectively bankrupted the company. The Kochs, for all their sins, are by all accounts philanthropic, skilled as businessmen, and rich enough (each has a net worth of over $30 billion) to invest in the paper.
Do read all the way down to the Hiram Johnson quote.
Also having sport at the journalistic anti-Koch hysteria is former Reasoner Michael C. Moynihan, over at The Daily Beast:
When billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett forked over $142 million to purchase 63 newspapers last year, most other newspapers didn't take much notice. Buffett's decision seemed backward-looking but deserving of praise: to us journalists, anyone rich and reckless enough to assume the cost of operating a newspaper in this grim media environment was worth celebrating.
But absent from the scattered coverage of the Buffett mega-purchase was the usual finger-wagging and moralizing about media concentration and the potential dangers of a politically engaged owner interfering in his newspapers' political coverage. Odd because Buffett is a political guy. He hosts fundraisers for President Obama, pens opinion pieces for The New York Times advocating a more progressive tax code (the so-called Buffett Rule, which the administration adopted in 2011), and pops up on Sunday political chat shows to expound on gridlocked Washington. […]
But it's not about journalism. It's about heretical politics. […]
There was quite a bit of excitement amongst my fellow journalists—which I shared—when Al Jazeera announced that it was opening shop in the United States, creating quite a few jobs in the process. None objected to the politics of its owners, the government of Qatar, whose record on democracy, environmentalism, human rights, and free speech leaves much to be desired. And as Human Rights Watch has pointed out, the station rarely reports at all on Qatar, much less reports critically.
But here's the good news. All those principled Los Angeles Times journalists who threatened to resign if those dreadful libertarians hijack their newspaper now have a more ethical alternative: the Qatari sheikhs are still hiring.
Reason on Charles and David Koch, the latter of whom sits on the Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees, here.
The post Not Every Journalist Fears the Kochspiracy appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Five weeks ago, in response to my piece about the death of neoliberal contrarianism, Matthew Yglesias countered that "neoliberalism is alive and well" at his home perch of Slate. If that's true you sure couldn't tell by reading Yglesias this month.
Yesterday, to mark May Day, he asked the question "Should We All Become Marxists?" (Partial answer: "Capitalism is looking pretty shabby," and "In summary, I'm not a Marxist. But I worry that political conservatives are going to turn me into one.") And hours before that, Yglesias declared that we need aggressive government intervention to counteract the problem that the world of 401(k)s "basically sucks":
We know roughly how much people need to put away in order to retire with a standard of living they'll be comfortable with. And we definitely know what kind of investment vehicles are most appropriate for middle class savers. And we have abundant evidence that, left to their own devices, a very large share of middle class savers will make the wrong choices. What's more, because of the nature of the right choices it's obvious that the dominant business strategy for vendors of middle class investment products is to dedicate your time and energy to developing and marketing inferior products, since the essence of superior products in this field is that they're less remunerative.
In other words: A disaster. What's needed is a much more forceful, much more statist approach to forced savings, whether that's quasi-savings in the form of higher taxes and more Social Security benefits or something like a Singapore-style system where "private" savings are pooled into a state-run investment fund.
Setting aside the contested question of what "we know," a major problem with the Social Security model of forced savings, as Nick Gillespie and Veronique de Rugy spelled out in a Reason cover story last year, is that "current workers are indeed paying for current retirees, not for their future selves, which means that as the number of contributors falls, payouts cannot continue at the same rate." And the number of contributors is falling like a rock: "In 1940 there were 159 workers for each beneficiary. Today there are fewer than three."
Because of this fundamental design flaw, the only way to even tread water on payouts, let alone provide the "more Social Security benefits" that Yglesias advocates, is by jacking up taxes. Which will make an already crappy economy crappier, an already low labor-force participation rate lower (thereby reducing still further the number of current workers paying into the system), all while likely increasing the number of people eligible for unemployment or other safety-net benefits from the money-bleeding government. Neat!
You don't have to read ideologically blinkered libertarian magazines to reach similar conclusions. Here's then-President Bill Clinton in his 1999 State of the Union Address:
[B]y 2013, payroll taxes will no longer be sufficient to cover monthly payments. By 2032, the Trust Fund will be exhausted and Social Security will be unable to pay the full benefits older Americans have been promised.
The best way to keep Social Security a rocksolid guarantee is not to make drastic cuts in benefits, not to raise payroll tax rates, not to drain resources from Social Security in the name of saving it. Instead, I propose that we make the historic decision to invest the surplus to save Social Security.
Needless to say, there are no longer any surpluses to spend, and no amount of wishlist tax hikes will bridge the current chasm between federal government revenue and expenditure, mostly because the latter doubled in nominal terms between 2000 and 2010. So the Clintonian approach is out, and tax hikes are in, and at least some commentators are agitating for more payouts, not less. This is the kind of thing I mean when I keep saying that the economic-policy center of gravity on Planet Liberalism has in recent years moved noticeably to the left.
Certainly, it has become unmoored on this subject from the original thinking of the original neoliberal, Washington Monthly founder Charles Peters. Here's a section from Peters' 1983 "A Neoliberal's Manifesto":
Another way the practical and the idealistic merge in neoliberal thinking is in our attitude toward income maintenance programs like Social Security, welfare, veterans' pensions, and unemployment compensation. We want to eliminate duplication and apply a means test to these programs. They would all become one insurance program against need.
As a practical matter, the country can't afford to spend money on people who don't need it—my aunt who uses her Social Security check to go to Europe or your brother-in-law who uses his unemployment compensation to finance a trip to Florida. And as liberal idealists, we don't think the well-off should be getting money from these programs anyway—every cent we can afford should go to helping those really in need.
So much for that version of liberalism.
Glenn Reynolds makes another important point about the "state-run investment fund" aspect of Yglesian forced savings:
If you want to see a pooled state-run investment fund, look at CalPers. It's going broke amid horribly politicized mismanagement. And state-run pension funds are subject to all sorts of politicized investment decisions that have nothing to do with the interests of the pensioners. At least with 401k plans, the politicians aren't involved — though I sense a political move to change that, too…
More on CalPERS and politicized pension-fund spending in this Reason cover story. For a day-by-day account of CalPERSian economics, I recommend Pension Tsunami. And to see what kind of politics results from retirement statism, look no further than the headline on this call-to-arms from the gang that opposes a Koch Bros. purchase of the Tribune Company: "Tell State Controller John Chiang: CalPERS must act to save the Los Angeles Times."
Yglesias and I debated entitlements, spending, and sequestration politics two months ago on WHYY Philadelphia.
The post Neoliberalism 3.0: 'more forceful, much more statist approach to forced savings' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It is instructive to watch the superstructure of liberalism wheeze into gear at the mere rumor of a right-wing-bogeyman purchase of a distressed, unloved newspaper company:
Three Los Angeles City Council members—including a candidate for mayor—asked their colleagues Tuesday to consider pulling city pension money from the investment firms that own the Los Angeles Times if they sell the publication to buyers who do not support "professional and objective journalism." […]
"Frankly what I hear about the Koch brothers, if it's true, it's the end of journalism," said [Councilman Bill] Rosendahl, a former broadcaster. "I don't want to see Los Angeles, the second-largest city and the biggest region in the nation, not to have a quality newspaper."
Rosendahl's motion calls on the council to support a buyer who has demonstrated "the highest terms of professional and objective journalism." It also calls for a report on how the city can use its pension funds and other investments as leverage to achieve that goal.
"We cannot support the sale of the Times to entities who Times readers would view as a political transaction first and foremost, turning L.A.'s metropolitan daily into an ideological mouthpiece whose commitment to empirical journalism would be unproven at best," Rosendahl wrote in the motion.
As I mentioned in my HuffPost Live appearance on the topic last night, it's striking how this concern over the unproven "commitment to empirical journalism" somehow does not apply to potential buyers who happen to be heavy in both Democratic and (unlike the Kochs) local politics. As Kathleen Miles reported this week at The Huffington Post,
The ownership that most Angelenos seem to favor is a coalition of LA billionaires who have expressed interest, led by former Democratic mayoral candidate Austin Beutner and including prominent Democratic donor Eli Broad.
Broad is not just any Democratic donor; he's a real estate developer (long the the most hated descriptor among newspaper purists in sprawling SoCal), a committed corporatist, and the most leveraged high-culture philanthropist in Los Angeles. He has so much skin in the game, from shaping local education policy to throwing lavish inaugural parties for President Barack Obama, that during my tenure on the L.A. Times editorial page he was commonly referred to around the office by just his first name. "Where's Eli on this?"; that kind of thing.
And yet, as Miles reported, here's what happend when columnist Steve Lopez asked his colleagues what they'd do under various ownership scenarios:
"Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Austin Beutner's group." No one raised their hands.
"Raise you hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by Rupert Murdoch." A few people raised their hands.
Facing the elephant trunk-on, "Raise your hand if you would quit if the paper was bought by the Koch brothers." About half the staff raised their hands.
Remarkable, isn't it? The staff (at least according to this unscientific poll) would prefer a massively conflicted local Democratic heavyweight with zero experience in journalism over even one of the most successful (if deservedly controversial) newspapermen on the planet.
Anyway, the City Council story is one of many reasons why politicizing pension funds is a bad idea. And this whole sale-rumor story is turning out to be an interesting exercise in smoking out the interests and fears of a deep blue city in decline mode. As LA Observed's Kevin Roderick pointed out, the head of the Courage Campaign, which is spearheading efforts to block Koch ownership of Tribune, "happens to be running an independent expenditure committee promoting Garcetti's campaign for mayor." That would be the same Garcetti just endorsed for mayor by the L.A. Times. The important thing here is to make sure things around Spring Street don't get too political.
The post L.A. City Councilmen Would Divest Pension Money From a Potentially Koch-Owned Tribune Co. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Hosted by former RT personality Alyona Minkovski, the panel was filled with people who have been advancing this particular story: Hillel Aron, who broke the news of possible Koch interest for the LA Weekly; Kathleen Miles, who reported yesterday in The Huffington Post on a recent gathering of LAT newsroom types at which half or so of the audience raised their hands when asked if they would quit after a Koch purchase; and Daniel Fisher, who published a shrewd analysis of the Kochs' potential interest over at Forbes.
Here is the full segment:
Some related past writing from me:
* "Are Big City Newspaper Inevitably Liberal Due to Market Forces?"
* "When Losers Write History: Why legacy-newspaper media reporters get their own industry so wrong"
* "Newspaper Daze" (book review of James O'Shea's The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers)
* "Free Sam Zell! Why media activists should be mocked for trying to block the buying and selling of newspapers and television stations."
The post Watch Matt Welch Talk Fear of a Koch Media Takeover on <em>HuffPost Live</em> appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Garance Franke-Ruta, a smart senior editor for The Atlantic, has an interesting piece about the recent news that Koch Industries is sniffing around the upcoming sale of the Tribune Company's eight newspapers. (David Koch, Charles's brother and frequent partner in business, politics, and philanthropy, is a trustee of the Reason Foundation, which publishes this website.)
Instead of focusing on the Kochs, who have become the left's favorite bogeymen-billionaires, Franke-Ruta concentrates on the underlying economics and politics of big-city newspapers:
There are several reasons regional newspapers are an awkward fit for anyone looking to counter-program what they see as liberal bias in the news media.
The main reason is that all major U.S. newspapers are based in cities. Cities in America are in the main run by Democrats, because they are populated, by and large, with Democrats, and very often also surrounded by Democratic suburbs. And because cities are run by Democrats, and populated by not only by Democrats but, very often, by liberal, minority, and immigrant Democrats, they tend to have laws on the books that at least formally signal a desire to serve the interests of these voting groups—their residents, let's call them.
Newspapers, which are businesses, are subject to the employment and other laws of the cities in which they are based. Because they are based in cities, and because cities are often at the forefront of progressive legislating, newspapers tend to work under employment laws and answer to regional communities that have distinctive views about what a just society looks like. Conservatives are right to call these views liberal, but it's just as important to recognize them as the product of representative democracy within defined urban spaces….Newspapers, like other businesses, have to follow the local laws—such as those protecting out gay employees—or risk getting sued. And, historically, they had to appeal to urban or urbanizing local residents if they wanted any subscribers.
It's a nifty theory, with the added benefit of containing plausible-sounding market elements. But is it true?
Well, let's take as a test the largest city in America you might describe as right-of-center: Houston. Fourth-biggest city, 12th-biggest daily, 7th city ranked on the largest-dailies list, politically mixed but a whole lotta conservatism headquartered and represented. Famously hostile to zoning, friendly to business. Are those politics reflected in the Houston Chronicle?
My exposure to the paper is very limited (and very positive, for what it's worth), but I don't recall any particularly conservate or libertarian point of view, or reputation thereof.
Like so many American dailies, including the Los Angeles Times (my former employer, and the plum property in the Tribune roster), the Chronicle was a strongly conservative newspaper as recently as the 1950s, before more a more progressive breed of journalist began gaining a foothold in the 1960s. Crucially, the transformation from right to left, from crassly political to high-mindedly "fair," went hand in hand with the paper benefiting from and engaging in newspaper consolidation. It was the classic deal between mostly liberal newsrooms and mostly conservative boardrooms: Close down the competition and use the profits to professionalize the news divisions, instilling a more liberal ethos even while embracing the advertising-friendly pose of objectivity. Then sit back and enjoy the 20 percent profit margins for four decades.
Back to the Chronicle, though the controversial and self-interested Houston Endowment ran the place through the late 1980s—like the "Great Eye of Sauron," according to this Texas Observer account—it was also increasingly going up against in-house journalistic values that cared more (according to verbiage at the same link) about "women's rights, poverty, and the mistreatment and neglect of ethnic populations, immigrants and refugees."
The paper has belonged to the similarly evolved Hearst Corporation for going on three decades, euthanizing the last of the competition in 1995. I am happy to be corrected in the comments, but if the Houston Chronicle is even half as friendly to conservative and libertarian viewpoints as the residents in its coverage area, I will sing a Backstreet Boys song in a Yao Ming jersey.
Ask yourself this: Of all the one-newspaper cities in America, how many are served by a daily that's more conservative than its readership? Pretty hard to come up with one, right?* Now do the same exercises for newspapers that are more liberal than their cities, and see how quickly you run out of fingers and toes.
So if regional political rub-off doesn't adequately explain it, what else could be at play in the liberalization (so to speak) of newspapers? I think Franke-Ruta is on firmer ground here:
Because employment at these city-based newspapers is voluntary, they tend to attract reporters who want to live in cities. The New York Times, for example, gets the Iowans who want to leave Iowa and live in Manhattan or Brooklyn. It does not get as many job applicants who want to live in traditional rural communities, because it is not a rural-community-based employer. Newspapers hire people who can deal with working in cities—big, major, complicated, diverse, progressive cities—and who will obey the socially progressive laws of those cities at work, even if they live off in the 'burbs somewhere.
I'd take this a step further: Journalists from newspapers all over the country want to work for The New York Times, even if their byline never gets within 100 miles of Gotham. Regional newspapers everywhere pattern their writing, their subject matter, their mores, on the Paper of Record.
Well, here's the problem with that: The New York Times is the product of a unique—and uniquely competitive—market. It already assumes that high finance and laissez-faire economics are covered by The Wall Street Journal. Crime, local shenanigans, and gossip are adequately handled by the Post and the Snooze. Newsday owns the suburbs. The vast majority of American dailies who ape The New York Times do not live in cities where whole swaths of their readership are properly served by other outlets.
Journalists have turned the daily newspaper into the print version of the local NPR station: intellectual, fuzzily liberal, elitist. Potential readers who have more of a talk radio sensibility have to go elsewhere. Like, well, talk radio (which does just fine in many famously liberal cities). The universality of the NYT model at a time when afternoon and/or populist dailies were going extinct worked as a short-cut on the more evolutionary process Franke-Ruta describes. Yes, big cities are going more liberal (though higher-growth Sun Belt cities aren't necessarily liberal at all), but my hunch is that the newspapers got there first.
Speaking of NPR, I was on it this morning, talking about…the rumored Koch interest in the Tribune Company! Listen here.
* Alert commenter Heroic Mulatto correctly points out that The Union-Leader of Manchester, New Hampshire famously fits the bill. I'll add other no-brainers as they arrive.
The post Are Big City Newspapers Inevitably Liberal Due to Market Forces? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>People in the Burning Man community misinterpreted it, because of general disdain for their media-spun vision of what the Koch brothers are all about, but this was not an attack on "Burning Man culture" but on what AFP sees as frivolous and irrelevant lawmaking and fee-imposition.
Apprentice fire performers between the ages of 18-21 must be supervised and trained by existing permit holders.
From their own side, a Reno-based group of fire performers who call themselves "Controlled Burn" and who pushed for the state law say it was to protect performers from inconsistent application of local codes from fire marshalls.
The law does restrict the licensing requirement to those "who performs for an audience using an open flame in a venue authorized by permit of a governmental entity," not to anyone practicing poi in the privacy of their own yards.
The Institute for Justice has compiled a useful document on the absurd number of occupations that it is illegal to practice in these here United States without state licensing.
My 2004 book about the festival's history, This is Burning Man, discusses the festival's anarcho-libertarian roots and its status as a (ironically, highly policed) Temporary Autonomous Zone. My May blogging on Burning Man's attempts to become a D.C. lobbying player.
The post Burning Kochs: Americans for Prosperity Stands Up For Firespinning Freedom appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Koch, who is serving as a delegate to the Republican National Convention from New York, spoke to POLITICO after delivering brief remarks at a reception held in his honor him by Americans for Prosperity, the political advocacy group he chairs and has helped fund.
The post David Koch Endorses Libertarian Views Within the GOP appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Politico took note Thursday that billionaire political bankroller David Koch – a New York delegate at the GOP convention – still believes libertarian things even while steering money toward GOP candidates who might not feel the same:
The 1980 vice presidential nominee for the socially liberal — but fiscally conservative — Libertarian Party, Koch told POLITICO "I believe in gay marriage" when asked about the GOP's stance on gay rights.
Romney opposes gay marriage, as do most Republicans, and when that was pointed out to Koch, he said "Well, I disagree with that."
Koch said he thinks the U.S. military should withdraw from the Middle East and said the government should consider defense spending cuts, as well as possible tax increases to get its fiscal house in order — a stance anathema to many in the Republican Party.
I shrugged when I saw the story yesterday, thinking this revelation is certainly not new – his view on gay marriage is in the guy's Wikipedia entry (though I didn't know his attitude about tax increases). But today I've noticed the story bouncing around the gay blogosphere with typical comments from people who think he's lying or ask why he's not using his money to support the fight for marriage recognition.
Koch is notably on the board for the Reason Foundation (which publishes this site and Reason magazine) and lately rather infamously on the board for the Cato Institute. Both Reason and Cato have published a significant number of statements and arguments positive of government recognition for gay marriage (while getting government out of marriage entirely is preferable, it's not likely). Ted Olson, one of the attorneys who represented the American Foundation for Equal Rights' lawsuit to overturn California's Proposition 8 gay marriage ban, also happens to be the counsel for Koch Industries (and a board member at Cato).
Clearly – and unfortunately – the anti-gay elements of the GOP won the day when writing the Republican Party's platform for 2012. But while their talking heads were extremely disciplined at staying on message in front of the cameras, we know just from the way the Ron Paul delegates were treated, that the Grand Old Party is not in the lockstep the left thinks it is.
The post People Seem Surprised Yet Again that David Koch Believes Libertarian Things appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The campaign, which is funded by Patriot Majority, kicks off Tuesday with a $500,000 cable television ad buy accusing Charles and David Koch of trying "to buy this year's elections and advance their agenda."
Continue Reading
It marks perhaps the most concerted — and certainly the best-funded — effort by Democrats to make an election issue of the Kochs, or any of the emergent class of conservative megadonors. The brothers intend to steer nearly $400 million in the run-up to Election Day to a linked network of conservative groups, including some that have aired among the most aggressive attack ads against President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies in Congress.
The post Ad Campaign Targets Koch Brothers appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When [Jeff] Riggenbach suggested recruiting '60s activist Abbie Hoffman for Cato's radio program, [Charles] Koch seemed surprised but didn't say what he thought. "Ed [Crane] had to tell me later how much Charles really hated the idea," Riggenbach says.
Riggenbach tells me that he wasn't proposing this as a one-time thing: He thought Hoffman should be a regular. Several figures on the left, such as Julian Bond, did contribute regularly to the program, which consisted of a daily syndicated 90-second commentary.
People are sometimes surprised when you tell them that a Koch-funded publication gave a platform to Noam Chomsky (who later said the magazine was "the only journal I could publish in as long as it existed"), or that in the lead-up to the 1984 election, David Koch wanted the Libertarian Party to nominate Earl Ravenal, a foreign policy analyst associated with the leftist Institute for Policy Studies. Lord knows how they'd react if there had been an Abbie Hoffman connection too.
Elsewhere in Reason: I wrote about Hoffman here and chatted with Rick Perlstein about him here. I detailed the younger Kochs' links to the left here.
Elsewhere not in Reason: Read National Review's 1979 attack on Cato and the Kochs as some sort of pinko conspiracy here. And hey: Abbie Hoffman might have missed out on that Koch connection (as opposed to a coke connection), but his Yippie comrade Paul Krassner did pop up in the same mag that published Chomsky.
The post The Kochs and the Yippies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week I mentioned in this space a long Washingtonian article about the Koch/Cato legal feud that, among other things, depicted Cato President Ed Crane's musings that a September 1990 speaking snub to Charles Koch at a historic Cato conference in Moscow might have been the source of the think tank co-founders' fallout. Now the Kochs have responded to the article, on their ForABetterCato.com website. Here's a selection on the Moscow anecdote:
The truth: Charles Koch had no desire to speak, never asked to, and did not leave as a result of any disagreement.
In reality, Charles Koch's concern with the conference agenda was that it never addressed the difficulty of transforming a Communist economy to a free-market economy. Without a focus on these transition issues, Charles Koch believed the recommendations would backfire and lead to anything but a free economy (which is, indeed, what happened). When Charles Koch advised Crane of this, Crane discounted the problem and refused to make changes.
Equal time: The Save Cato page on Facebook.
David Koch sits on The Reason Foundation's Board of Trustees, and Reason collaborates constantly with The Cato Institute. Disclosures and other information can be found in my prior blog posts (in chronological order): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported earlier this week that several other think tanks are facing succession issues. Excerpt:
In the past 18 months, many of the leaders associated with institutions such as the Rand Corp., the Center for New American Security, the Asia Society, the Urban Institute and several other think tanks have stepped down or announced plans to do so.
Even Edwin Feulner — a founding trustee when the Heritage Foundation opened its doors in 1973 and president since 1977 — will be exiting.
The post Kochs Deny Ed Crane's Account of Moscow Speaking Snub appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>