Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake • Hacker News Board

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#441

Post by tomhoward » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 12:38 PM UTC

rospaya wrote: post #223

BurningFrog wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for doing the work! Another angle is that Jeff Bezos, richest man in the world, has $184B. That's $550 per American, or $24 per human. Undeniably a lot of money, but also far from a sum that would change the world if it got redistributed.

His wealth is mostly stock, right? In fact most of the billionaires have their weight in stocks. In a theoretical situation where Bezos goes to unload all of his stocks to end world hunger, who would be there to buy it? Would the stock devalue the moment he starts selling it? It's complicated.

Spot on. This is the point most people seem to overlook/ignore/dismiss when they advocate taxing billionaires' capital to fund state programs.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#442

Post by 93po » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #350

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In July 2015 Charles Koch and his brother were praised by President Obama and Anthony Van Jones for their bipartisan efforts to reform the criminal justice system.[67][68] For roughly a decade Koch has been advocating for several reforms within the prison system, including the reduction of recidivist criminals, easing the employment process for rehabilitated persons, and the defense of private property from asset fo…

Koch is an honest libertarian, so his Deregulate All The Things efforts are accompanied by things like this. But. If you look at where he's been putting his money into supporting candidates, they are overwhelmingly Republicans that align with the former to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It would have been very VERY easy for Koch to have got bipartisan support for serious criminal justice reform if he had wa…

Koch is either a massive failure if he really cares about things like the prison industrial complex and entirely failed to make even the smallest change despite billions of dollars, or he's just a massive liar. One option seems much more likely than the other given his large GOP support

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#443

Post by x86_64Ubuntu » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

shard wrote: post #285

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean the white working class. And no one in their right mind thinks that the Republican party is less corporatist than the Democratic party. With the CARES Act, the Trump administration fought to keep secret which businesses received money. Come to find out, multinational and conglomerate entities like Ruth Chris' Steakhouse received funds.

According to polls, Trump had been making inroads into black and Latino communities as well, with approval rising from 2016 to 2020 from 5% to 9% in black communities and rising from 28% to 44% in Latino communities.

That is still considered a landslide in the world of politics. Despite the attempts by conservatives to see some light at the tunnel, the conservative ideology will always be a rump party in communities of color.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#444

Post by redis_mlc » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 2:08 PM UTC

redis_mlc wrote: post #345

bredren wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We saw this in the Portland mayoral race. The only on-ballot challenger to the incumbent used political tactics that overcame what would normally be exclusionary credentials. It was so successful, I was taken aback by it. At one point I had a chance to speak with the candidate by phone, and I spoke about my concerns about the divisive rhetoric. The candidate said it was only something they had to do to "fire up my ba…

> my concerns about the divisive rhetoric. When you have a two-party system, you get binary outcomes - ie. divisiveness. It doesn't even make sense to expect something else.

[dead]

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#445

Post by jvanderbot » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 2:27 PM UTC

TT3351 wrote: post #400

jvanderbot wrote: post #193

Classic end-of-life turn. Getty, etc. The Koch Family Foundation for Fossil-Free Energy would go a long way.

... toward lowering his grandchildren's income taxes via deductions.

That's true, but not a bad thing. We reward charitable donations for a good reason. Ideally, he'd have given away his fortune as he made it (and lived in a world where that wasn't risky), but we live in a world where it seems responsible to save millions or billions and grow them, then dedicate it something as you realize you can't take it with you.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#446

Post by jrochkind1 » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 3:01 PM UTC

xdavidliu wrote: post #253

jrochkind1 wrote: post #89

Is there a trick to getting around the WSJ paywall?

someone posted a link above: https://archive.is/TDVJM However, I'm not sure how to answer your question in the general case.

Thanks!

I'm not sure I would have noticed this link unless you had replied to me, I guess now I know to search for "archive.is" in comments...

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#447

Post by jkestner » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

webmaven wrote: post #350

qPM9l3XJrF wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In July 2015 Charles Koch and his brother were praised by President Obama and Anthony Van Jones for their bipartisan efforts to reform the criminal justice system.[67][68] For roughly a decade Koch has been advocating for several reforms within the prison system, including the reduction of recidivist criminals, easing the employment process for rehabilitated persons, and the defense of private property from asset fo…

Koch is an honest libertarian, so his Deregulate All The Things efforts are accompanied by things like this. But. If you look at where he's been putting his money into supporting candidates, they are overwhelmingly Republicans that align with the former to the exclusion of nearly everything else. It would have been very VERY easy for Koch to have got bipartisan support for serious criminal justice reform if he had wa…

> That’s the main problem I have with libertarians

If they’re with Republicans on reducing regulation, and with Republicans on social issues, they’re just called Republicans.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#448

Post by blaser-waffle » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #300

pjscott wrote: post #266

I looked a bit at what Charles Koch has been saying recently, and this doesn't look like a change of opinion; it looks like a change of tactics. He's de-emphasizing the partisan tug-o-war stuff, which looks less promising now than it did during (for example) the early days of the Tea Party, and focusing on the less fought-over parts. It's a reasonable approach if he wants to get things done, but not the about-face th…

I'm not sure if I'm being overly cynical - but isn't this just a tactic to consolidate the gains he managed to win by discouraging the other side from using his methods? Similar to how challengers decry bureaucracy, but once they become incumbents, wield it as a cudgel to swat down upstarts.

Precisely. He got his tax cut; his pendulum swung so far to his side that Joe Biden is seen as a liberal candidate.

He's advocating for a comfy middle ground cuz he's won the war and now wants peace and quiet

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#449

Post by nokcha » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 3:46 PM UTC

extra88 wrote: post #439

rhino369 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because grammatically (then or now), that part of the sentence doesn't limit the independent clause--"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." If the first amendment said, "A well read electorate, being necessary to a free state, the right the people to free speech, shall not be infringed," would you say it only covered political speech? Practically, I don't see how it makes any differe…

> If the first amendment said, "A well read electorate, being necessary to a free state, the right the people to free speech, shall not be infringed," would you say it only covered political speech? I would say the intent is much narrower than the actual text so while "a well read electorate" would call for more than just political speech, such a First Amendment would be allow more laws to restrict speech without bei…

>I would say the intent is much narrower than the actual text

Justice Scalia rejected the notion of giving much importance to the intent of drafters. His objective was to interpret the text according to its original public meaning.

As Scalia noted in Heller, the Second Amendment "codified a pre-existing right"; it didn't grant a new right. And although "self-defense had little to do with the right’s codification", "it was the central component of the right itself".

>People in the armed forces don't own the weapons they use now.

That's exactly the system that the framers wanted to avoid. The citizen militia (with their own privately owned arms) was envisioned as an alternative to a standing army in times of peace.

>Today, the National Guard is basically the "Militia."

The National Guard is the organized part of the militia. The unorganized militia has much broader membership. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/246

>there's nothing unconstitutional about laws requiring trigger locks or other safety measures for their storage.

The trigger-lock requirement wasn't limited to storage. It didn't have an exception to allow removing the trigger lock to use to the gun in self-defense or for carrying holstered on one's person. That's why it was ruled unconstitutional.

Re: Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake

#450

Post by disgruntledphd2 » Mon, Nov 16, 2020, 4:25 PM UTC

nugget wrote: post #428

ramphastidae wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How do you think Europe/France solves for the Bezos-WaPo "problem" whereby wealthy individuals can convert money into political influence indirectly by controlling media companies?

The media laws make it harder to spout propaganda, and the media regulators don't allow these people to buy media, and also well funded public media organisations.