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Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

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Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#41
post #37

“Dark Money” by Jane Mayer was extremely enlightening. The influence of the Koch family on politics and public opinion has been devastating. The Federalist Society is a conspiracy against democracy.

Can you give a brief synopsis about how the federalist society is a conspiracy against democracy? I thought it was about originalism which seems to me to be pro-democracy by maintaining proper separation of powers etc.

The Federalist Society finds, indoctrinates, and advances conservative lawyers and judges. That's not inherently anti-democratic though their level of success and influence on judges selection processes may be considered so. The problem is they also tend to be highly partisan (pro-Republican) which undermines the separation of powers.

Often their picks ignore their "originalist" approach when it would be counter to their desired outcome.

I'm no expert, this is from my general understanding and skimming Wikipedia.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I am a voluntarist so I do not think forced wealth redistribution is the answer. But it’s clear to me that there are ways we can move to different businesses structures and property norms so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands. It’s a challenge, for sure. And some proposed solutions may cause more harm that good. Bu…

> so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands If you look at the data, i think you'll find that billionaires own a very small proportion of all wealth

Very rough numbers, a bit out of date:

Allegedly about 2100 billionaires - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World%27s_Billionaires

A couple of years ago all the millionaires put together controlled about 45% of global wealth - https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-wealth-concentration...

Since billionaires are a subset of those, then they cannot possibly control any more than 45%, so certainly less than half.

Can't find a source showing just billionaires, at the moment, but the first source suggests that the billionaires have a net worth on the order of 9 to 10 trillion; if billionaires control 10 trillion, and about 130 trillion is 45% of the wealth, then billionaires are in control of somewhere around 4% of global wealth.

As a rough calculation in sixty seconds, this does appear to support your assertion that billionaires control a small proportion of wealth. If you team them up with all the millionaires, they're up to almost 50%, but just the billionaires on their own; not so much.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#43
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively. Each registered candidate with more than a certain number of signatures of support should be given a budget of money and pre-paid airtime on all major networks by the FEC, and that's it. Once it's out, it's out. All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be ill…

"Should" is a very easy word to throw out. Yeah, elections should be all those things. The problem is the follow up questions of "how?", "what would the unintended consequences be?" and "can we enforce this objectively when the situation gets murky?". It seems all but impossible to stop billionaires like Koch waging public relations campaigns. If nothing else they'll just buy entire media companies (c.f. Bezos and th…

Not impossible at all. This is a solved problem in much of Europe. Read about France’s election process. The problem is that elected officials in the US don’t have much incentive to represent the will of their constituency — only their donors. And their donors do not want campaign finance reform because it eliminates their influence. This is not a logistics issue, it’s a corruption issue.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#44
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Greenpeace, with a 'campaign' director who used to fly up & down from Luxemburg to Amsterdam for his commute? [0] Dutch, no international sources available AFAIK : [0] https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/artikel/1806716/greenpeace-v...

Do you dispute the figure?

I object to your polarizing language.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#45
post #39
post #24

"Mr. Koch has written (with Brian Hooks) a new book, “Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World,”" Can it get any more cynical than this?

Forgive my asking - what's cynical about this title? Should we not believe in people? Is the world not top-down oriented? Sorry - just confused.

Why should anyone believe an oligarch, who has been the embodiment of top-down influence, wants "the people" to direct how society operates?

His version of "bottom-up" is heavily funding astroturf campaigns as well as more populist groups through which he can control what they do.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I am a voluntarist so I do not think forced wealth redistribution is the answer. But it’s clear to me that there are ways we can move to different businesses structures and property norms so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands. It’s a challenge, for sure. And some proposed solutions may cause more harm that good. Bu…

If rich people payed tax at the same rate as ordinary people, we'd be living in the same system without harmful extremes of inequality.

Nope. Marginal propensity to spend kills that out of the gate. Poor people save a much smaller proportion of their income than rich people, on average. Since rich people are rich (meaning that percentage is out of a bigger pie than the poor person's), and their savings rates are higher than poor people, you just multiply that out and see that rich people will get richer much faster than poor people.

This doesn't take into account taxes, however, which means that we're assuming a 0% flat tax rate. But, you see, what happens is that if you start imposing a positive taxation rate, then all that changes in the preceding argument is the definition of who is "rich" and who is "poor." The general trend is all that matters.

One actual limitation to point out is that this argument doesn't take investment into account. Over long enough time periods, all major asset classes have a positive expected return, so, it doesn't matter precisely what people invest in. What does matter is how much they have to invest, and how long "long enough" time periods are.

IIRC, for the stock market, "long enough" means 15 years or so. Since this is much shorter than a single human lifetime, you see that all someone who is rich enough to invest has to do is just keep shovelling money into their brokerage account, and it will pay off eventually.

Poor people don't even get to that point. The hows and whys of that are myriad, so I won't even get into that. Just imagine that, instead of calling them "poor people," we call them "economically fragile" people. Then, what you start to realize is that a small bump in the road, like, say, an unexpected car repair, can really devastate an economically fragile person's finances.

And, because economically fragile people don't have a lot of money coming in, their expenses are pretty low. That means that even if they follow standard personal finance advice and try to accumulate a 6 month emergency fund, a car repair costs what a car repair costs, so it's going to eat a much larger chunk of that emergency fund for the economically fragile person than the non-economically fragile person.

Oh, and, because economic fragility is relative (meaning if you, and everybody else have 1 quatloo each and I have 10 quatloos, I'm still as "rich" overall as if everybody had 10 quatloos each, and I had 100), that means starting poor and getting rich takes a long, long time, and may not ever happen.

TL;DR: A completely flat tax rate for all citizens implies that the rich will get richer, and the poor will stay fairly poor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_propensity_to_consume

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#47
post #41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you give a brief synopsis about how the federalist society is a conspiracy against democracy? I thought it was about originalism which seems to me to be pro-democracy by maintaining proper separation of powers etc.

The Federalist Society finds, indoctrinates, and advances conservative lawyers and judges. That's not inherently anti-democratic though their level of success and influence on judges selection processes may be considered so. The problem is they also tend to be highly partisan (pro-Republican) which undermines the separation of powers. Often their picks ignore their "originalist" approach when it would be counter to t…

I believe for the last 30 years or so (after the late Antonin Scalia) 'conservative' judge is almost synonymous with originalist. I think you may be falling victim to correlation is not causation? IE there are no liberal originalists by definition (above). If I'm wrong, could you give me an example of a liberal originalist? I would be very happy to be wrong about this.

The correlation here is that conservative presidents pick justices who object to rulings like Roe v Wade. The mistaken 'cause' is that it is Conservatism that leads to this objection when in fact it could also be that originalists object to legislation from the bench.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj_MhS2u-Pk

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#48
post #5

Shouldn't have been allowed to have undemocratic control over that amount of political power (wealth) to begin with.

Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively. Each registered candidate with more than a certain number of signatures of support should be given a budget of money and pre-paid airtime on all major networks by the FEC, and that's it. Once it's out, it's out. All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be ill…

What about Hollywood and athletic endorsements? Would those be in-kind?

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#49
post #27

The US seems to be in the middle of another realignment, like in the 60s. The Democratic party is consolidating its support from the big corporations, while the Republican party is making inroads with the working class.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. It's a big part of the cognitive dissonance felt by much of America, I think.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#50
When you ask yourself how the system is rigged this bad and why congress is so bought out and each policy a carefully chosen business strategy instead of in the interest of average citizens you don't have to look further than the excellent example of the koch brothers who, in their infinite desire for infinite profits, have rigged the legislature and executive branches to use as a crowbar on the wallets and rainy day funds of everyone.
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