Ideas for Sale
DylanRatigan.com
Ideas for Sale
October 7, 2011
“IDEAS FOR SALE”: HOW DIME STORE MINIGARCH ART POPE BECAME THE KOCH KINGPIN OF NORTH CAROLINA
By Mark Ames
Last week, Yasha Levine and I broke our Nation magazine story on The Dylan Ratigan Show exposing free-market hypocrisy by Charles Koch and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek on a scale so grotesque it was hard to know whether to laugh or scream, or both. A brief recap: We revealed letters from the early-mid 1970s in which Charles Koch- the biggest funder of a four-decade-long campaign to destroy Social Security and Medicare-privately championed Social Security and Medicare in order to lure Hayek out of Austria (where he enjoyed universal health care) and into America, so that Hayek could front for Koch’s war on entitlements. Hayek was more than happy to oblige Koch, except for one problem: Hayek was privately afraid of America’s free-market health care system, so afraid that he initially turned Koch’s offer down. But as Charles Koch was to find out, Hayek was a fellow traveler in free-market hypocrisy: Back in the 1950’s, while Hayek was at the University of Chicago, the Austrian-born economist had secretly and voluntarily opted into the Social Security program, and continued paying in for 40 quarters-qualifying Hayek for Medicare and Social Security, just in time for Charles Koch’s invitation. That was great news for all, because it meant Hayek could come out and help Koch destroy Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously living off those same programs, and not worry about falling through the brutal free-market “safety net” that Hayek privately feared.
This was more than mere rank hypocrisy. This was-and is-a colossal scam played out on a public largely unaware that ideas could be corrupted and sold in respectable society in a manner as blatantly corrupt and cynical as this.
Why did Koch need Hayek to front for him? Imagine if Koch himself-a billionaire heir to his daddy’s oil fortune-went around arguing that all the non-billionaire non-heirs should drop their Medicare and Social Security for the cause of “freedom” and “personal liberty” and “empowerment”: No one would buy it.
Moreover, things were much, much different in 1973, when Koch and Hayek had those exchange of letters. Back then, no sane politician from either party would be caught dead saying the sorts of things that mainstream Republicans today are saying about these programs (“Ponzi scheme” “monstrous lie”) and mainstream Democrats are preparing to enact (“entitlement reforms” “Bowles-Simpson Commission”). It wasn’t just Democrats who fully supported those programs, so did Republicans. Nixon, for example, massively expanded both programs during his presidency; and President Eisenhower famously wrote during his term in the White House,
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Eisenhower hadn’t imagined that the grandson of one of those “Texas oil millionaires,” Charles Koch, had a plan on how to raise their numbers from negligible to the tipping point of respectability: Corrupt ideas at their source, so that as they disseminate throughout the culture, eventually such ideas become respectable, and even “courageous” in the words of many a Sunday talk show host…and when that happens, you have an environment that Ike never imagined, in which Republican candidates Go Galt on Social Security to the cheers of the party base, while the fake-progressive Democratic Party President occupies the “reasonable” “middle-ground” on slashing those programs…leaving little or no oxygen for any politician in either party to talk about how both programs might be expanded, let alone preserved.
So Koch needed a guy like Hayek to provide respectable academic/intellectual cover for a set of ideas-equating “liberty” and “freedom” with “I can’t afford health care” and “I can’t afford to retire”-ideas whose real goal is to claw back for Koch’s ultra-rich class all of the wealth redistributed to the middle- and working-classes in the post-New Deal era.
Hayek had academic respectability; with Hayek fronting for Charles Koch, Hayek could plausibly claim that he’d arrived at this set of ideas calling for the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare not out of his own self-interest, since Hayek wasn’t ultra-rich like Koch, but rather through rigorous, disinterested intellectual pursuit of Higher Truths.
In Hayek’s 1960 work, Constitution of Liberty, he devotes an entire chapter titled “Social Security” arguing nine essential reasons why Social Security and socialized medicine will destroy freedom-loving peoples everywhere (they will lead to Soviet-style hospitals and mind-control, bring on totalitarianism, lower our life spans, etc.). And yet, as we learn from the private Koch-Hayek letters in the 1970s, even while Hayek was working onConstitution of Liberty denouncing Social Security, privately, he was paying in to the program, on a purely voluntary basis (as a foreign citizen working at the University of Chicago, Hayek had the option of declining) hoping that some day the state would take care of him, totalitarianism or no totalitarianism.
Hayek got his socialized-medicine wish; and Koch got his Hayek. Today, “Austrian Economics” is a branded version of austere free-market economics that owes its success to its rich rightwing sponsors. Once considered crackpots and corporate frauds, today these economists are responsible for framing the way we talk about politics-and they owe it all to Charles Koch and a handful of his fellow ‘Bagger Barons on the right.
This is how crazy ideas are seeded, cultivated, and distributed, particularly since the explosion of right-wing think-tanks in the 1970s, coinciding with the explosion of money in politics.
Thanks to the Koch brothers’ long-term investments into ideas that directly benefit them and promote their vision of a return to the Harding-Coolidge Era-and thanks to their mandarins like Hayek-today, corrupt politicians don’t fear promoting a blatantly pro-plutocratic, anti-middle-class, anti-99-percenter politics...
Ideas for Sale
October 7, 2011
“IDEAS FOR SALE”: HOW DIME STORE MINIGARCH ART POPE BECAME THE KOCH KINGPIN OF NORTH CAROLINA
By Mark Ames
Last week, Yasha Levine and I broke our Nation magazine story on The Dylan Ratigan Show exposing free-market hypocrisy by Charles Koch and Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek on a scale so grotesque it was hard to know whether to laugh or scream, or both. A brief recap: We revealed letters from the early-mid 1970s in which Charles Koch- the biggest funder of a four-decade-long campaign to destroy Social Security and Medicare-privately championed Social Security and Medicare in order to lure Hayek out of Austria (where he enjoyed universal health care) and into America, so that Hayek could front for Koch’s war on entitlements. Hayek was more than happy to oblige Koch, except for one problem: Hayek was privately afraid of America’s free-market health care system, so afraid that he initially turned Koch’s offer down. But as Charles Koch was to find out, Hayek was a fellow traveler in free-market hypocrisy: Back in the 1950’s, while Hayek was at the University of Chicago, the Austrian-born economist had secretly and voluntarily opted into the Social Security program, and continued paying in for 40 quarters-qualifying Hayek for Medicare and Social Security, just in time for Charles Koch’s invitation. That was great news for all, because it meant Hayek could come out and help Koch destroy Social Security and Medicare while simultaneously living off those same programs, and not worry about falling through the brutal free-market “safety net” that Hayek privately feared.
This was more than mere rank hypocrisy. This was-and is-a colossal scam played out on a public largely unaware that ideas could be corrupted and sold in respectable society in a manner as blatantly corrupt and cynical as this.
Why did Koch need Hayek to front for him? Imagine if Koch himself-a billionaire heir to his daddy’s oil fortune-went around arguing that all the non-billionaire non-heirs should drop their Medicare and Social Security for the cause of “freedom” and “personal liberty” and “empowerment”: No one would buy it.
Moreover, things were much, much different in 1973, when Koch and Hayek had those exchange of letters. Back then, no sane politician from either party would be caught dead saying the sorts of things that mainstream Republicans today are saying about these programs (“Ponzi scheme” “monstrous lie”) and mainstream Democrats are preparing to enact (“entitlement reforms” “Bowles-Simpson Commission”). It wasn’t just Democrats who fully supported those programs, so did Republicans. Nixon, for example, massively expanded both programs during his presidency; and President Eisenhower famously wrote during his term in the White House,
“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Eisenhower hadn’t imagined that the grandson of one of those “Texas oil millionaires,” Charles Koch, had a plan on how to raise their numbers from negligible to the tipping point of respectability: Corrupt ideas at their source, so that as they disseminate throughout the culture, eventually such ideas become respectable, and even “courageous” in the words of many a Sunday talk show host…and when that happens, you have an environment that Ike never imagined, in which Republican candidates Go Galt on Social Security to the cheers of the party base, while the fake-progressive Democratic Party President occupies the “reasonable” “middle-ground” on slashing those programs…leaving little or no oxygen for any politician in either party to talk about how both programs might be expanded, let alone preserved.
So Koch needed a guy like Hayek to provide respectable academic/intellectual cover for a set of ideas-equating “liberty” and “freedom” with “I can’t afford health care” and “I can’t afford to retire”-ideas whose real goal is to claw back for Koch’s ultra-rich class all of the wealth redistributed to the middle- and working-classes in the post-New Deal era.
Hayek had academic respectability; with Hayek fronting for Charles Koch, Hayek could plausibly claim that he’d arrived at this set of ideas calling for the dismantling of Social Security and Medicare not out of his own self-interest, since Hayek wasn’t ultra-rich like Koch, but rather through rigorous, disinterested intellectual pursuit of Higher Truths.
In Hayek’s 1960 work, Constitution of Liberty, he devotes an entire chapter titled “Social Security” arguing nine essential reasons why Social Security and socialized medicine will destroy freedom-loving peoples everywhere (they will lead to Soviet-style hospitals and mind-control, bring on totalitarianism, lower our life spans, etc.). And yet, as we learn from the private Koch-Hayek letters in the 1970s, even while Hayek was working onConstitution of Liberty denouncing Social Security, privately, he was paying in to the program, on a purely voluntary basis (as a foreign citizen working at the University of Chicago, Hayek had the option of declining) hoping that some day the state would take care of him, totalitarianism or no totalitarianism.
Hayek got his socialized-medicine wish; and Koch got his Hayek. Today, “Austrian Economics” is a branded version of austere free-market economics that owes its success to its rich rightwing sponsors. Once considered crackpots and corporate frauds, today these economists are responsible for framing the way we talk about politics-and they owe it all to Charles Koch and a handful of his fellow ‘Bagger Barons on the right.
This is how crazy ideas are seeded, cultivated, and distributed, particularly since the explosion of right-wing think-tanks in the 1970s, coinciding with the explosion of money in politics.
Thanks to the Koch brothers’ long-term investments into ideas that directly benefit them and promote their vision of a return to the Harding-Coolidge Era-and thanks to their mandarins like Hayek-today, corrupt politicians don’t fear promoting a blatantly pro-plutocratic, anti-middle-class, anti-99-percenter politics...