T he brothers are known as champions of the free market who advocate for lower taxes, less government regulation, and for people helping themselves rather than relying on government handouts. Their critics describe their agenda as fringe and radical and say the Tea Party and Republican conservatives have adopted many of their beliefs. The brothers are majority stakeholders, which makes them very, very rich.
We will continue to oppose their efforts to buy our democracy, because we represent America — not just rich Americans. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee started a website called kochaddiction. The Democrats are counting on their base not only for money but for votes this fall so they can keep control of the Senate. They also point out that the Democrats have their own millionaire donors. Tom Steyer, for example, plans to spend millions of dollars this election cycle, primarily supporting Democrats and advocating for climate change policies.
Pseudonyms will no longer be permitted. The Koch Brothers oppose federal entitlements. The Libertarian philosophy places heavy emphasis on personal responsibility.
While the Affordable Care Act is not an entitlement, it does require insurers to accept applicants without regard to prior medical conditions. The universal acceptance rule is a change that reduces the freedom of businesses in favor of protecting citizens. The below-listed items are among the large number of issues that the Koch brothers actively oppose:.
The Conservative and Libertarian approaches would diminish the role of the government. They would not support the clear majority of social programs that exist today. The extent that the Koch Brothers would reduce the role of government would be alarming to millions of Americans that have relied upon the social contract including Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The Koch view is that government funds follow the limited role of government.
Their view is that small government does not reach into private markets or the lives of its citizens. The Affordable Care Act reforms the insurance industry, provides financial assistance and expands the number of people with insurance coverage. Medicaid Expansion illustrates the goal of the ACA. The expansion raised the limit for getting Medicaid coverage so that those with too little income for Obamacare would have regular medical care. The Koch brothers opposed the Cadillac tax provision that penalizes overly generous employee health benefits.
Koch Industries provides health benefits that clearly exceeded the below-listed limits set in the Affordable care Act. The basic DNA of the Koch Bothers approach is that government should not create benefits, entitlements, or regulate the industry for the public benefit. They back their Conservative Libertarian philosophy with millions in political and institutional funding. Their impact is apparent in elections on the state and federal levels. They have invested their efforts in the idea that government should not interfere with private businesses and free markets.
The opposition to Obamacare was remarkable for its investment and intensity but not for its quality. They oppose government spending and social actions of nearly every kind. Comparison shopping is the ideal way to find the best values in health insurance. Because of the way that incentives work at your firm, a given employee can start making more money than his or her manager. Does that create turmoil? But let me just say it works great. It does. Look at basketball: does the coach quit because LeBron James makes more?
Keep it up and I hope you make five times what I do. The answer is yes, but not structured. I want a system of spontaneous … What I want, my ideal — if the world were ready for it — is to truly have a society that represented the principles in the Declaration of Independence.
That is: everyone is created equal with certain inalienable rights and governments are instituted to secure those rights. You would hope, finally. I look at government. What is government? That is: government is the social institution with a legal monopoly on force in a given geographic area. The nature of government is force. I believe that government should act when force works better than voluntary cooperation and competition. The starting point on things it does is use force when force is inherent in it, like to protect the country from foreign invasion.
Police try to protect people from being robbed and killed. But there needs to be a social safety net. KOCH: No! Hey, I was a rugby player. You kidding me? What changed? We need to help them mobilize to get this stuff done. It looked like he was going to advance some of these ideas. Then he went the other way. Under him, the federal government grew 50 percent more than it did under Clinton and roughly three times the number of restrictive regulations were passed under him.
We got in disastrous wars and just one thing after the other. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio : once he got started, the reach got broader and broader.
Persuade me that those are not the motivations and that your desired social engineering is for the greater good.
But basically I was blessed starting at an early age to have learned certain principles, concepts and values that transformed my life and enabled me to accomplish more than I ever dreamed possible. Since that time I wanted to give as many people the opportunity to do the same.
That is: to develop their full potential and become lifelong learners and lead successful fulfilling lives. I want to do that in my communities.
It changes their mental models. It changes the way their brain is hard-wired. I have seen these ideas transform thousands of people. So they lead better lives, as Frederick Douglass did once he got these ideas. I want the people to be liberated. KOCH: Because it transformed my life. Because if you have a success and you feel good about it, then you want more of that. The list of charitable causes supported by Charles Koch, and his brother David, is long and diverse , and would surely find approval with even their most devout political enemies.
David is particularly well-known in New York for funding the arts and medical research. Among the Koch Industries beneficiaries are the United Negro College Fund ; Project JumpStart , which provides construction training; and the movement for criminal-justice reform.
KOCH: Like everything else, we need a legal system that is just, where the punishment fits the crime. We also need a system that, if people make a mistake, [they] learn from their mistake. They need to have a second chance rather than ruin their lives.
What did they do? They fight back or run and then they get shot. The whole thing escalates. For instance: critics say that some of the criminal-justice reform legislation the Kochs support would also make it harder to punish corporations like theirs for environmental or safety violations. Their political operation employs about 1, people in more than offices across the country — which, as Politico noted, makes it far bigger than the Republican National Committee itself.
So how, and why, did Charles Koch come to be such a huge political player? As he tells it, the genesis goes back decades, and is firmly rooted in ideological principles. KOCH: I tried to read and meet people who would give me ideas, expose me to principles that I could apply in all aspects of my life: business, social community and in the societal realm.
As I did this, it became clear to me that virtually every human being has the ability to learn, develop, contribute and succeed if they are given the freedom and opportunity to do so.
Then I learned that when ideas of individual rights and equal rights started to come into being — in Holland first, spread to England, in the United States, even France and other countries, particularly in Europe — that it liberated the average person. And as they were liberated, then they started working to develop themselves, to better themselves.
In the process they made themselves rich, relatively, and then made everybody else rich. The first steps were giving out scholarships, setting up think tanks, and funding like-minded academics. KOCH: It became obvious that we had a society and a political system largely governed to satisfy special interests and parties had formed around those special interests, which George Washington worried about.
As you know, he warned us that if the politics become an extension of parties that we will lose a lot of the promise and hope for the country because parties become an end in themselves, in advancing them and their supporters and special interests.
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