Lying about who you are to trick an ideological adversary into embarrassing himself on tape?
A dubious means of advancing your cause.
But James Taranto notes a key difference between an effective conservative sting operation against an NPR officer, Ron Schiller, and an earlier, ineffective liberal sting operation against Governor Walker of Wisconsin. Namely, “that the guy who prank-called Walker claimed to be an actual person, so that there was a second victim of his prank.”
The other victim in the Walker sting, which rocked Wisconsin politics with all the power of a wet firecracker, was industrialist David Koch, one of two brothers who have philanthropically supported free-market causes over the years. They’ve been a major backer of the Cato Institute, for example. The guy pretending to be David Koch in the prank phone call to Walker sought to represent the Kochs’ influence on Wisconsin politics as somehow corrupt and immoral. The opposite is true.
Richard Fink, executive vice president of Koch Industries, told National Review Online that the brothers won’t be deterred by smear attacks from the left.
“We will not step back at all,” Fink says. “We firmly believe that economic freedom has benefited the overwhelming majority of society, including workers, who earn higher wages when you have open and free markets. When government grows as it has with the Bush and Obama administrations, that is what destroys prosperity.”
Good for them.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “Kochs: The Real Thing”
Well, Obviously these Kochs are un-American, because they are doing and saying things that make people doubt the ethics and direction of our government. Or the people that are in our government. Undermining the veracity of the very insitututions that those people had worked so hard to scramble to the top of.
Liberals believe that corporations and businessmen are greedy because they exist to make a profit. Yet they think that government employees/officials are angels. At least businesses earn their money by providing goods/services that we freely choose to by. Government employees/officials, on the other hand, use force to get theirs.
Seems to me, liberals are misplacing their criticism.
And for those that think corporations get “favors” from the government (subsidies, restrictions on competition, etc.) unfairly, they are right – but again, they should blame the politicians for giving them.
For those “liberals” who oppose a free market, I suggest that you read a book called “The Triumph of Liberty” by Jim Powell. It’s a good look at where the term liberal came from. I also recommend you read the book “Out of Control” by Kevin Kelly ( http://www.kk.org ), and the essay by F A Hayek “Why I am Not a Conservative” –they are both easy to find online for free.
Liberals have betrayed their free market roots, by first abandoning the education of their children to the government. How does that allow social tolerance, and individual freedom and freedom of expression, over time? It doesn’t. Those who receive tax dollars fight to receive more and more of them.
Liberals need to learn this lesson, or some variation of Orwell’s 1984 will most certainly come true. (I mean, more true than it has already, since the USA has 4% of the world’s population, and 25% of its prison population. There are over 1.2 million innocent people in our prisons.)
Do you still think that the government schools taught you everything you needed to know about the law and government? When you get in front of a judge and mention the Bill of Rights, they laugh at you and threaten you with a $1,000 fine if you mention the Constitution in “their” court.
In my time as a petitioner for the Libertarian Party, not one person in a thousand could name their rights as jurors, nor their other rights, under the Bill of Rights.
What is the effect of this, nationwide? Enslavement. And don’t give me your uneducated-liberal crap about “How dare I compare taxation to slavery?” I can do that because I’ve read Frederick Douglass. Douglass was amazed to see that the product of one’s labor in the North was free of income taxation. He was amazed to see the wealth of New England, because he secretly feared that it took slavery to produce wealth. He recognized the flaws in his thinking were caused by slavery.
Examine your own minds: the same flaws are there. You cower and beg for the right to keep what you’ve earned, and you resent the man who’s found a way to earn enough that the parasites can be ignored. This causes you to cheer the parasites, without noticing how their theft cripples you. …Jealousy and insecurity are the real reasons you hate the Koch brothers.
Look at the thieving left’s heroes: Obama and Clinton? Marx? Castro’s executioner on a T-shirt? You might as well be worshipping Jeffrey Dahmer, since he hurt far fewer people than all of those I just named.
My advice: stop drifting through reality with a total absence of philosophy, and support a system of free market wealth creation. First thing’s first: Support the destruction of the Federal Reserve by buying silver and gold, and trade with people who accept silver and gold. Learn how to defend yourself using Marc Stevens’ tactics in court. You cannot protect your own wealth if you cannot defend yourself from brute force acting under the color of law. See: http://www.fija.org and http://marcstevens.net