03.01.11

The Fork-tongued Ayn Randian piffle of the plutocrat

Posted in Permanent Fail at 3:19 pm by George Smith

Charles Koch — yeah, one of those guys — has an editorial in today’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s full of the self-important supremacy-flavored cant peddled by the super-rich. In other words, you can destroy the argument from authority position in a few strokes by examples taken from real life.

Some Koch quotes are particularly trenchant when looking back at yesterday’s post in the Economic Treason series.

Sayeth the Koch:

Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers — not governments — to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.

Yeah, American middle class consumers, not the government, sure do have a lot of influence on what gets made by the top arms manufacturers, almost all of them US.

General Dynamics Land Systems is acutely sensitive to the free market and unusually generous to “our poorest citizens.”

If you just stopped in, that’s a joke.

The US industry of arms manufacturing is the very example of “socialism” for the benefit of the private sector. It is guaranteed and protected by the US government, whatever the cost.

Here’s another Koch brother doozy:

The purpose of business is to efficiently convert resources into products and services that make people’s lives better. Businesses that fail to do so should be allowed to go bankrupt rather than be bailed out.

There’s certainly no doubt that having the biggest share of arms manufacturing in world history produces “services and products” that make some people’s lives better. It’s just not most of ours, at this point.

General Dynamics plutocrat compensation, 2010.

Permalink