They may still call themselves republicans, but in policy they are libertarians out to steal the world and to hell with anyone in their way.
From Thom Hartmann
https://open.substack.com/pub/thomhartm ... dium=email
Thom Hartmann
Nov 13
Every Sunday I share with you a chapter or two from one of my books. This is a serialization of the entire book, done a chapter or two every Sunday for the next few months, of The Hidden History of the War on Voting.
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Around that same time, a Russian immigrant who’d fled the Soviet Union (her father had lost his pharmacy shop to the Bolshevik Revolution) came to America with dreams of becoming a great author or actress. Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum chose the stage and pen name of Ayn Rand, and in the 1950s she wrote a rather simplistic novel celebrating inherited wealth.
In Atlas Shrugged, a young woman and her hapless brother inherit a railroad from their father and try to grow it over opposition from the unions, which want a safe workplace and reasonable pay. As George Monbiot wrote:
In a notorious passage, she argues that all the passengers in a train filled with poisoned fumes deserved their fate. One, for instance, was a teacher who taught children to be team players; one was a mother married to a civil servant, who cared for her children; one was a housewife “who believed that she had the right to elect politicians, of whom she knew nothing.”35
In a subsequent novel, The Fountainhead, one of the “producers” of her mythology rapes a woman, but it’s all good because the woman decides that she enjoys it mid-rape. Monbiot boils it down simply: “Rand’s is the philosophy of the psychopath, a misanthropic fantasy of cruelty, revenge and greed.”
While Fred Koch was helping the JBS in its fight against taxes and regulation, his sons were apparently reading Ayn Rand and taking her philosophy of radical selfishness to heart. They were also, by the 1970s, running the Koch oil operation and having constant struggles with regulators, particularly during the Carter administration.
Looking for political juice, David Koch joined and then largely took over the Libertarian Party in the late 1970s.
That political party had been created by the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), a lobbying group formed in 1946 that represented the Big Three carmakers, the top three US oil companies, Monsanto, DuPont, GE, Merrill Lynch, Eli Lilly, and both US Steel and Republic Steel. Robert Welch, the founder of the John Birch Society, was on its board of directors, as were United Fruit president Herb Cornuelle; National Association of Manufacturers director and DuPont and GM board member Donaldson Brown; and Leonard Read, a longtime US Chamber of Commerce executive.
The mission of the new libertarian movement was straightforward: to lobby for the interests of big business and the uber-wealthy people that such business had created.
The same year that the FEE was created and they began the rollout of libertarianism, Congress busted an obscure University of Chicago economist named Milton Friedman for illegally shilling for the real estate industry.
As Mark Ames wrote:
The purpose of the FEE—and libertarianism, as it was originally created—was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations."
Reason magazine, heavily funded by the Kochs, was the main voice of the libertarian movement in the 1970s, and in 1977 it published a fascinating article by Moshe Kroy that described how libertarians should market their free-market fundamentalism to skeptical Americans. Noting that it was important not to lie to people outright, Kroy wrote, “The point is that you can use tricks—and you’d better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance.”39
The tricks involved repackaging and reframing libertarian dogma and using “salesmanship.”
unnecessary and excessive growth of government.”
Most Americans didn’t think he meant that we should stop funding hospitals and public schools, or devastate LBJ’s Great Society programs that had cut the poverty rate in America in half. They didn’t see Betsy DeVos or Scott Pruitt on the horizon.
But there they were.
They said it out loud then and yet this damning purpose of our rich class has no effect on the voters today.Ironically, in 1980, the year Reagan was first elected president, David Koch essentially outed the Libertarian Party. He made a massive donation to the party, and they put him on the ticket as vice president. And he figured that Americans were smart enough that he wouldn’t have to use the salesmanship that Moshe Kroy had advocated just a few years earlier.
The Libertarian Party platform on which Koch ran in 1980 was unambiguous. It included the following:
We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services. . . .
We favor the repeal of the . . . Social Security system. . . .
We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
We support repeal of all . . . minimum wage laws. . . .
Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended. . . .
We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency. . . .
We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system. . . .
We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. . . .
We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and “aid to the poor” programs.44
The list went on from there, including ending government oversight of abusive banking practices by ending all usury laws; privatizing our airports, the FAA, Amtrak, and all of our rivers; and shutting down the Post Office. In a bone they threw to the white supremacist, white evangelical, and Catholic Christian movements, they also called for an end of all tax-supported abortions (although the Hyde Amendment had already banned this in 1976).
Koch thought they’d kicked off a movement, but when the election returns came in, he was disappointed. Commenting that he’d always been talking to friendly crowds, he candidly noted that he was surprised when his candidacy pulled only about a million votes nationwide.
So the billionaires walked away from libertarianism and turned their attention to taking over the Republican Party. That, it turned out, was much easier.