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| Charles and David Koch |
But I finally decided to thumb my nose at outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose ludicrous, quixotic attacks on the libertarian Koch brother billionaires were inspired by crackpot leftist conspiracy theorists, that the Koch brothers were "buying" elections. Libertarians are in an intrinsically difficult situation: they argue that we have to reform an unsustainable welfare state, an out-of-control regulatory state that chokes out entrepreneurship and innovation, an entitlement state where over two-thirds of the inadequately financed federal budget is spent on individual vs. common-purpose expenditures; libertarians have to play bad cop, to say 'no' to business as usual, while social liberals/"progressives" resort to fear-mongering the general public over changes to house-of-cards senior entitlements with liabilities exceeding the global domestic product, a Ponzi scheme far greater than anything Madoff ever dreamed of.
I have raised this point in prior posts; I have never met or been contacted by the Koch brothers or their surrogates; I've never seen or been offered a single penny by them. I do have a relative who works for one of their subsidiaries. That fact played a role in a negative personal experience. In post-2001 Chicago, my professional DBA opportunities had dwindled; I had a particular in-demand specialization doing upgrades of Oracle's ERP software (E-Business Suite). I had gotten an unsolicited project-availability query from a third-party agency on behalf of an undisclosed Kansas client. (Quite typically the agencies will not disclose salient details in fear, say, of tipping off a candidate who might cut a deal directly with the client, something I've never done.) Upgrade projects typically run from a few weeks to a few months; I normally asked for a very competitive hourly rate plus expenses, a fraction of what Oracle Consulting had charged for my services. The gig had progressed to the point I was asked to book my first week of travel to Wichita, and the client was identified as a Koch Industries entity. I had not been in Kansas for years, and I thought maybe instead of going home my first weekend, I might stay with my relative and contacted him. Instead of responding positively to an unexpected visit, he went apeshit, screaming incoherently about a company nepotism policy--never mind the relative did not know the specifics of what I did for a living, never presented me with any information about Koch opportunities and did not work for the operating unit in question. Almost immediately after my call, my contact with the agency in question went completely dead--no returned phone calls or emails. I had pulled myself off the market for the gig and did not have a fallback position. I had no interest in permanent employment in Kansas; it boggled my mind that Koch would drop a win-win contract over the incidental fact of my relative's employment status. Years later my relative contacted me, saying that Koch had reformed their nepotism policy and encouraged me to apply; I suggested that the Koch brothers might do something anatomically impossible; they hadn't merely burned their bridges to me, they had nuked them.
As most people know, David Koch ran on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, the same year I stood in a Texas Democrat precinct caucus for Ted Kennedy. As David Koch said during a recent Barbara Walters interview, he's socially liberal (e.g., gay rights agenda, abortion) but an economic conservative (i.e., free markets, sound money, etc.) There is no question that the GOP's stances with fewer regulations, lower taxes and spending, pro-trade, etc. are more consistent with his free market perspective than the Democrats' centralized Statist views; there can be little doubt that Statist policies exacerbate poverty and other issues. As to a more socially liberal agenda, keep in mind that the GOP are not running on an agenda, say, to criminalize gay relationships, to implement a federal ban on early-stage abortion, etc.; for the most part, conservatives want to devolve social issues to state/local regulation. "Social agenda" items include things of the government "leave me alone" variety: e.g., decriminalize victimless crimes, keep your nose out of my private communications, etc. Some "conservitarians" like Rand Paul, Massie and Amash do address these issues, although we're still in the minority of the GOP.
Is the GOP the reality of a libertarian's dream? No. It's still an uphill battle to shelve the Patriot Act, to stop perpetual military interventions, to defend civil liberties given a sympathetic law-and-order perspective, to balance the budget, including shrinking the bloated Defense budget. But the GOP is the only game in town when it comes to reforming the Fed (in particular, ending the full employment mandate), addressing the unsustainable federal budget, and devolving authority and resources to the states. Unless we deal with the collapse of economic liberty and the subsequent rotting, morally hazardous, welfare state that robs people of their liberty and dignity and makes them slavish dependents on the fruits of legal plunder, it's difficult to know how we manage to restore other aspects of liberty.
