The Koch brothers have been called the ‘bankrollers of the Tea Party’. But apparently, the government shut-down is bad for business. They’re trying to rein in the monster they created. They believe that efforts to defund the ACA ‘is a doomed and destructive distraction and that the Republican-led House should refocus on fiscal issues.’
The extreme Right want to ‘starve the beast’. But they ignore the benefits of the beast. They’re like farmers who have mules to pull their plows. They like having a mule to pull their plow, but they don’t like cleaning up the piles of manure; so they stop feeding it to reduce the manure, ignoring the obvious fact that a starved beast cannot perform its duties. (Not to mention that manure is a useful product.)
In a society there are things people like, and things people don’t like. What some people don’t realise is that while they may not see a direct benefit from their contributions to society, they do receive a benefit. I don’t have children, and I will never have children; and yet I have to pay taxes to send other people’s kids to school. I receive no direct benefit from paying taxes that go to schools. But education is good for society, and so I benefit indirectly from there being an educated populace.
The Koch brothers and others of their ilk only want direct benefits, with little or no appreciation of the indirect ones. They (and by ‘they’ I mean all of the money people who created and/or support the Tea Party) are finding out that their direct benefits are threatened when the monster they created runs amok.
Who’s to say if the OP linked article is true? Maybe the Koch’s are publicly distancing themselves from the shut down, but that isn’t necessarily an indicator of wat they’re saying privately.
Curiously, this thread from just 3 days ago argued that the Tea Party wasn’t populist. Now this thread, and one other from today that I can’t seem to find, are both arguing the exact opposite – that the Tea Party is so populist that it can’t be controlled.
I tried really, really hard to work up some sympathy for the Koch brothers. Sorry, but all my sympathy has gone towards people who are actually suffering from this Congressional Tantrum.
The goals of the Koch brothers are not necessarily those of the local notables who are supposedly the most likely to be big Tea Party backers. While I can’t speak one way or another to the veracity of the “local notables” theory, if true they seem more like anarcho-libertarians who think that they will come out ahead if government is minimalized, because they have wealth based on local businesses, connections, and property rather than in the stock market. They don’t really care if the stock market collapses, at least compared to the cosmopolitan upper-middle class who have more of their wealth in stocks.
I’m not sure how much of their wealth the Kochs have in stocks, but they probably don’t want the government to collapse completely unlike the anarcho-libertarians and their lower income fellow travelers who are motivated by a combination of “sticking it to washington”, personal dislke of Obama, and a misguided feeling that not raising the debt ceiling will magically rein in spending.
Whereas the Kochs need the federal government to function long enough to let them do as they please in their oil business. Pipeline right of ways don’t eminent domain themselves, dontcha know.
It occurred to me that perhaps I meant to say that it’s “anarcho capitalist” that the local notables bear some resemblance to. They’re both anarchists and that’s bad right?
