Sunday, August 29, 2010

The New York Times on David and Charles Koch and the Tea Party Movement - Oh, the Condescension!

Perhaps the most fundamental question defining the political divide between the left and the right today is as straightforward as can be: who ought to decide how money is to be spent - the people who earn it or someone else, in the name of the community, society, the common good, the common interest, etc.?

Since states were organized and money was invented, people had always forfeited a part of their earnings to their governments, in the form of taxes, in the understanding that such taxes would be used for financing a state machine, which would provide goods mostly related to its monopoly of legal force: an army for external defense, a police force for internal security, a system of courts for the enforcement of contracts. In modern states this contract was slightly modified, to include certain cases, in which collective or state action was deemed to be preferable to individual action in order to bring about a result desirable to society as a whole, like universal literacy (and later education), some works of infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc., which were initially outside the confinements of private property), etc. But this arrangement, reasonable at first, gave birth to an ever-increasing bureaucracy and the temptations, in a democratic system of government, for opposing political fractions to use the state mechanism for political favors to the electorate - this called for a larger realm of state action which, in turn, needed its own bureaucracy and needed money to work. And this, of course, meant more taxes. 

Moreover, after FDR took over during the Depression, a new role for the government emerged: give money away, create public projects, if only to stimulate demand. And this, of course, meant even more taxes. And today an ever increasing large part of the public sector purportedly serves needs, which would be much better served by the market - which means that people's incomes (and transactions and hereditary transfers and so on) are taxed for some other people, either elected or, in most cases, unelected, to decide where they should be spent, such decisions no longer limited to the basic functions of the state or even to providing goods and services which would be better (or almost as well) provided by the state than the market.

This would inevitably lead to reaction by people who think that the government, in taxing and spending, decreases the value of their work or their entrepreneurship in order to feed the special interests which have inevitably sprung out of this process. This reaction has taken the forms of grassroots organizations, most prominent of which today is the (collectively so named) Tea Party. And these organizations may be financed by wealthy people, who lose a lot more money to taxation than ordinary Americans.

According to an Op-ed by Frank Rich in the New York Times, these Tea Partiers are stupid. How can they not understand that their actions only help to serve the super-rich? How can they connect themselves with what, I guess, are supposed to be their class adversaries? And how can they accept contributions from such evil people, such as the Koch brothers?

Because the Koch brothers are evil, as so thoroughly established by a New Yorker article. Yes, very much so. They want to pay less taxes, instead they want to spend their money on hypocritical donations to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts or, even worse, to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Not to mention that their father was afraid of Communist infiltration back in 1963 (when such an event was so unfeasible! - see the Guillaume Affair in 1973-1974), that David Koch was the Vice-Presidential Nominee of the extremist Libertarian Party and they both helped with the founding of the reactionary Cato Institute (where the person who is most responsible for turning me into a reactionary, Professor Bradley A. Smith, has outrageously defended actual free speech in campaigns). And, what's more, they give money to candidates or political causes they support!

After mentioning all these evil deeds and tendencies, Rich goes on with some ramblings about Murdoch (guilt by association for the Koch brothers?), but not before he has pointed out the great contradiction in these simple-minded Tea Partiers' positions: they want to have a government that does not run a deficit, and at the same time they "have no objection to running up trillions in red ink tax cuts to corporations and the superrich" (Tea Partiers, apparently because of the mind control exercised over them by the Kochs, do not realize that part of a rich person's earnings, if in excess of a certain amount, becomes ipso jure property of the government). So, it once again comes down to the question asked in the beginning of this post: should the corporations and the superrich (sic - although last time I checked the non-superrich were not exempt from taxation) decide where to spend their money, or should this decision be left to the benevolent governmental bureaucracy? In other words, not giving the government money leaves it with (oh, the horror!) less money to spend in pursuit of its noble causes, of which the stimulation of the economy is once again the premier.

So the Koch brothers want less taxes - but, at the same time, they donate unheard-of sums of money to causes they believe in. Not only think-tanks and candidates, but to foundations for culture or for battling cancer. Why, if they purport to be so generous, do they not give the money to the government? My reactionary response (or rather hypothesis) is this: they want their money to go where they feel that it will have a positive impact on society, on others. They do not want the money to go to a grant for a search of the mating habits of snails in Utah, so that the government can both do political favors with other people's money and claim, at the same time, that it is energetic in bringing the economy back to its feet. I will also dare to guess that the Tea Partiers are privy to such intentions and do not in any way feel manipulated by the evil, seductive, and so patently hypocritical David and Charles Koch.

2 comments:

Midway Information Group said...

But doesn't it seem wrong that Koch Industries produces products that contribute to cancer (i.e. formaldehyde in household products) and seek to abolish regulation of their industries, while donating large sums to a cancer center? Sounds like "guilt" money to me!

ADTsiouras said...

Is that so?

Seriously, now: I really am in no position to confirm how much the Koch brothers have lobbied with respect to the classification of formaldehyde by the EPA (no amount of money spent to that effect is reported by Rich, and the New Yorker article states that the Kochs have donated money to legislators who "stymied" the E.P.A., no further evidence is offered that directly connects any money spent by the Koch brothers on lobbying for formaldehyde to retain its "probable carcinogen" status). Anyway, this post is not written as a defense of the Koch brothers (who I do not know and have no relation with), but definitely in defense of their preference to donate their money to charities or foundations of their choice, rather than giving it away as tax money. And, guilt money or not, it is much better spent on the Cancer Center than on some whimsical program or pork money coming out of a stimulus package. And I am very grateful to them, after reading the New Yorker article, for their involvement in founding the Cato Institute; I did not know of their role in that until now.