It sounds like Cato is purging itself of non-believers (via):
The libertarian Cato Institute is parting with two of its most prominent scholars. Brink Lindsey, the institute’s vice president of research and the author of the successful book The Age of Abundance, is departing to take a position at the Kauffman Foundation. Will Wilkinson, a Cato scholar, collaborator with Lindsey, and editor of the online Cato Unbound, is leaving on September 15; he just began blogging politics for the Economist.
I asked for comment on this and was told that the institute does not typically comment on personnel matters. But you have to struggle not to see a political context to this. Lindsey and Wilkinson are among the Cato scholars who most often find common cause with liberals. In 2006, after the GOP lost Congress, Lindsey coined the term “Liberaltarians” to suggest that Libertarians and liberals could work together outside of the conservative movement. Shortly after this, he launched a dinner series where liberals and Libertarians met to discuss big ideas. (Disclosure: I attended some of these dinners.) In 2009 and 2010, as the libertarian movement moved back into the right’s fold, Lindsey remained iconoclastic—just last month he penned a rare, biting criticism of The Battle, a book by AEI President Arthur Brooks which argues that economic theory is at the center of a new American culture war.
I believe Cato’s funding is largely from the Koch family. I’m hoping to read the New Yorker piece on the Kochs this evening.
Stooleo
The New Yorker piece is elucidating and depressing. Shows what you can do with unlimited funds and a messianic view for America.
Amanda in the South Bay
Is this really that surprising? What passes for mainstream libertarianism (CATO, Reason, etc) have always been shills for the GOP. Torture, unlimited executive power? Who gives a shit. HCR? Oh noes, Stalinism unleashed!!!!
As Weigel’s drift Teabaggerwards has shown, they are all pretty pathetic fuckers.
Amanda
+2
Amanda in the South Bay
I mean what passes for establishment libertarians, (as fuckers) not anyone in particular (like any commenters here).
jl
News on the infotaineurial conservatarian front is coming too fast and furious to keep up.
This story, if it turns out to be one, will be worth watching
For sale: Conservative bloggers and (possibly) Mike Huckbaee
Are bloggers getting extra “advertising” cash from campaigns? And is Mike Huckabee’s endorsement for sale?
Alex Pareene at Salon
http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2010/08/23/bloggers_for_sale/index.html
Cole is an apostate to the cause, so I doubt he could attract any conservopayloa. But then there is the mystery of who pays for TunchFeed. And now there is Rosie. Something is up since Cole is putting it out the ridiculous notion that Rosie is losing weight. Why would say such obvious nonsense? (A desperate attempt to cover his tracks?).
El Cid
Are they airbrushing the heretics out of the hallway photos?
Violet
It’s like the purity purges of the party in the old Soviet Union. There just aren’t that many totally pure individuals out there.
Incertus (Brian)
Well, if their policies were ever in danger of being fully realized, it might damage them beyond all recognition, so better to do the purge now and forestall that eventuality.
freelancer
From Jane Mayer’s Article:
Jesus Christ on a cracker, you could splay this all over Glenn Beck and the wingnut response would be “just Soros funded propaganda”.
arguingwithsignposts
Maybe they can get a job as an unlicensed barber, or something.
parsimon
A number of previously self-professed libertarians have been rethinking their positions, I believe.
Belvoir
I’ve only read the first page of the New Yorker article (out of ten), and it looks promising. A nice corrective at least to New York magazine’s tongue-bath of Charles Koch recently. These people need to be exposed, these “think tanks” and “Institutes”. There’s too many to remember. Enterprise! Competitiveness! Family Research! Where the hell do they get all this money? From people like the Koch brothers. Whose conglom pulls in $100 billion a year, according to this article. One hundred billion dollars a year to wage war against the government, Obama, health care, labor laws, environmental laws, you name it. If it’s in the service of evil and to the detriment of our society, they will throw billions at it as they hide in the shadows. I don’t care what they give to museums and the ballet, these are seriously malevolent forces at work here, and they need some exposure to daylight.
WereBear
@freelancer: That’s meaty with awesome sauce.
What is it about having gobs of money that drives people insane? I once read a book about the Vanderbilts, and by the fourth generation they were drinking themselves to death unless they used a gun for suicide.
El Cid
@arguingwithsignposts: FREEBIRD!
Macsenmifune
@WereBear: They’re bored?
WereBear
@Macsenmifune: I agree; that has a lot to do with.
Imagine your whole life… with nothing at stake.
kommrade reproductive vigor
When truth is an emetic of course there will be purges.
MikeJ
@WereBear: How much you have at stake is up to you, if you’ve got the needs of the body covered comfortably for life. I’ve never believed in the “nobility” of work qua work. Your life has as much meaning as you give it. Being forced to flip burgers doesn’t make you a better person than someone who has everything handed to him on a silver platter. There are some perfectly lovely rich people and some complete assholes who toil in the fields.
Spaghetti Lee
Fuck Charles Koch. Death is too good for him.
minachica
Am I the only one who finds it intriguing that Obama’s mom (Ann Dunham) was born in Wichita KS around the same time as the Koch brothers?
I only noticed because I grew up in Wichita — and, as much as I hate to admit it, managed to escape Wichita thanks to a Koch-sponsored scholarship. I didn’t know they were evil back then.
I got cold sweats reading the New Yorker profile.
burnspbesq
Speaking of freewheeling markets, the popcorn futures market is about to tank. Get out of those long positions before it’s too late.
http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=5491020
shecky
After all that time pumping up my libertarian cred by going, “WTF with barber licensing?”, my dreams of becoming a Cato fellow go up in smoke.
Or do they???
I can’t help but laugh every time the Right kicks more folks out of the tent and hem up all the slack. It’s gotta be getting pretty cozy in there by now.
Triassic Sands
The New Yorker has great articles, but can I justify spending the time necessary to read a long magazine article about two rich libertarians? Libertarians are dumb, but a couple of libertarians with billions of dollars could be really dangerous.
OK, the article is by Jane Mayer. That makes it worth a look.
burnspbesq
The Koch brothers are the best argument I know for public financing of elections.
burnspbesq
@Triassic Sands:
“Know your enemy” is still good advice.
MikeJ
@shecky: Hours too late, I return to ripping cds and run across an early 90s gem that would have been apropos:
Now I’m a fan of Morgan Fairchild.
Her big ol’ hair makes me crazy and wild.
I fantasize about Marie Antoinette.
She had five-foot hair before Final Net.
I need a B-52 beehive girl
with a twisty do like a DQ swirl.
I see all that hair goin’ to waste.
Every time I say it, I get maced.
gex
@WereBear: Which interestingly suggests that these trust fund babies might have had more fulfilling lives if the estate tax had caused them to have to strive for something, anything.
Anne Laurie
@WereBear:
I’d argue there’s a particular form of psychosis that drives an individual to collect ‘gobs of money’ as a displacement for other, more socially functional goals. People like the Kochs act as though the raw amount of MONEY is the supremely interesting / important goal, which too often means treating objects, properties, and people as ‘markers’, objects to be manipulated for the further accumulation & protection of the Money. We laugh at, or pity, people whose lives revolve around hoarding Elvis memorabilia, or Beanie Babies, or just plain junk, but people who channel their OCD impulses into hoarding dollars get to use the power of those dollars to re-arrange our whole political structure to enable them to better acquire and hoard more dollars.
DougJ
@shecky:
That made me laugh.
Amanda in the South Bay
@shecky:
Marijuana smoke, that is.
WereBear
@Anne Laurie: Yes, it’s Hoarders, using Real Lives!
And they fall for it too; I’m rich, why don’t people love me? Why aren’t I running more things? Why isn’t my ass being kissed?
A lot of it is compensation for not having, you know, actual qualities. I’ve known nice rich people; but they were either not born that way, or raised by people who actually care.
While neglecting your children takes a hideous form when you’re poor, the ultimate product is only cosmetically better when you’re rich. I hark back to hanging out with the teenaged children of rich people, and most of them were Less than Zero (before the book, but I was familiar with the form.)
They were just another charm for their parent’s bracelet, and they knew it. They could get a car by whining for it, and then it was never good enough. The thing about them was how oddly passionless they were. To actually enjoy something was not only uncool; it was alien to them.
They live without knowing pleasure, unless they get it from drugs or psychotic manipulation. Not all of them, of course.
But a lot of them.
Brachiator
Wow. This is good stuff. I guess the only question is whether “principaled” libertarians will understand the degree to which they have been played by oligarchs, and whether they will have the smarts and guts to fight back.
It’s been a tough decade for libertarians. The Bush/Cheney regime made it clear that they were champions of narrow business interests, not the free market, and libertarians choked on it and kept punching out their happy talk bullshit.
Then, Dubya dropped the other shoe and made it clear that he was deeply down with the most anti-rational, anti-science, narrowly religious fundamentalists, and the libertarians just choked it down some more and kept punching out their happy talk bullshit. Libertarians could pretend to be tough minded rationalists, but it’s strange that they didn’t see that they had been kicked to the dustbin of conservatism.
Now, the oligarchs make is plain that they intend to make libertarians their bitch.
And they expect to be obeyed.
Bob
Six or eight months ago I had an exchange over at E.D’s place, LOOG. I said I was starting to worry as I was agreeing more and more with Will W. Strange days.
Bob
@parsimon:
I wonder if it might have something to do with ineffectual libertarian understanding of the real world, The 00’s certainly did not work out well. Even Greenspan had to admit he did not understand
freemarkets.Platonicspoof
__
That critique at The AmP has some interesting links in it (the critique itself hardly seems cause for disqualification from the CATO Club – agreement on goals, but different analyses).
From the AmP article:
“. . . Ireland, the Netherlands and, by a wide margin, Denmark were found to have freer markets [than the U.S.]”
And:
“A 2001 paper ‘Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State?’ . . . . , provides powerful evidence that race is at the center of the story”.
And there are a couple more in there on American attitudes worth knowing about (minus the libertarian, etc., interpretations).
burnspbesq
@Platonicspoof:
That was a fun read. Thanks for the link.
burnspbesq
From the Alesina et al paper that Lindsey links to:
No shit, Sherlock.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@burnspbesq: This. I had goose bumps reading the article. At least this exposes the Koch brothers’ activities to the wider world. But given the Citizens United ruling, I shudder what to think they’ll do to derail candidates whose views don’t tally with their business interests and profits. Then there’s the fact that one of the Koch brothers sits on the National Cancer Institutes’ advisory board while his companies fight the NIH re overwhelming proof from scientific studies that formaldehyde used in the manufacturing process is a human carcinogen. This bit about their father also made my stomach turn:
So we have members of the lucky sperm club fighting to preserve and expand the empire handed down to them by their father even if it means the rest of us get lower standards of living, the deleterious effects of man made warming and no social safety net. I wish it was possible to deport the Kochs to the libertarian utopia called Somalia.
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
Oops. Not sure what word in my previous post tripped the moderation filter. To sum it all up, the Koch’s suck big time but at least their activities are now exposed.
Mnemosyne
@Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people):
There’s a reason people spell a certain word as “soshulist” and other variations. The correct spelling contains the name of a popular erection drug and trips the spam filter.
silentbeep
ok I was listening to a reason.tv episode and listened to a little bit of what brick lindsay had to say regarding where libertarians fit into the grand left-right scheme of things
http://reason.com/blog/2010/08/23/brink-lindsey-and-will-wilkins
Now he said something that just cracked me up, sitting next to Jonah Goldberg no less:
“contemporary conservative politics is dominated by angry white guys and the women who love them.”
LOLOL
Felanius Kootea (formerly Salt and freshly ground black people)
@Mnemosyne: Ah of course. I didn’t notice that the word social1st was in the excerpt I quoted.
Funny that three different people forwarded me the New Yorker article DougJ linked to today. Maybe there’s a match for the Koch’s out there.
Quiddity
New Yorker piece is 9,962 words long. Have fun! (BTW, I read it and it’s okay, but could be tighter.)
Michael
In a truly just world, the “meritocratic” heir Koch brothers would have to have the undersides of their limos swept for bombs every time they left their homes and would need to employ food testers.
The world would be a much better place if each of them were spectacularly whacked on pay-per-view.