Saturday, January 5, 2013
P.S.
Mr. Bryce is a well respected journalist whose works have appeared in such diverse publications as the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, Counterpunch, Slate.com, and the Austin Chronicle. Yes, he did work for several months at the Institute for Energy Research and, yes, he's currently employed as a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, but to say that this guy is some sort of a conservative automaton is as abject a display of ignorance as I have heard of late (notice how his critics never question his work, only his "associations"). All that you have to do is read his book and/or listen to him to realize that the man isn't a hard-core conservative but an independent moderate who has criticized Bush on numerous occasions and who has actually credited Obama for his not having stood in the way of fracking. Maybe these leftists (who were so up in arms over the right's having tarred Obama via his associations - in many cases justifiably so) need to think outside the box once in a while (and, yes, listen to somebody who understands the law of thermodynamics for change) and not be so hell-bent on destroying the entire world economy 24/7.
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10 comments:
He seems fair enough to me. Whether he is an expert in thermodyanamics, I can't for sure say...:)
I saw him on PBS and he was debating somebody from the Natural Resource Council and the man was exceedingly measured. To say (as some folks have) that he is some sort of shill for the Koch brothers is ridiculous (the same as it was for the right to tar Obama with Ayers, etc.).
Idiotic guilt by association argument. I hate them. It's the same bullshit people try to do to Milton Friedman and how some of his students advised Pinochet on implementing some neoliberal reforms in Chile. Turns out Friedman only met with Pinochet for about half an hour. Discredit the man purely by association. This article from Reason clears up the confusion.
http://reason.com/archives/2006/12/15/the-economist-and-the-dictator
If you're familiar with Token Libertarian Girl (Julie Borowski) on YouTube, she's gotten similar idiotic comments because she was an Institute for Humane Studies Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow at one point in her college career. That's almost like saying that anyone who works for Chick-fil-A is a homophobic bigot, which is certainly not the case.
Koch brothers receive a lot of bad press. In fairness, they have chem eng. degrees from MIT (hardly an
easy route) and are surprizingly broad in their philanthropy. They are portrayed as heavy-handed in their use of $$ for political purposes and probably need a better
PR dept. Have an old chemist friend that had a career at one
of their refineries and retired well. I usually contribute to opposite organizations, but hold no grudge...other than my contributions are a bit smaller...
"Koch brothers receive a lot of bad press. In fairness, they have chem eng. degrees from MIT (hardly an
easy route) and are surprizingly broad in their philanthropy. They are portrayed as heavy-handed in their use of $$ for political purposes and probably need a better"
The first time I had really heard about the Koch Brothers was via an internet discussion where someone brought up the Cato Institute and claimed that the libertarian movement had been bought out by corporate interests. The guy who said this was an anti-austerity, Paul Krugman loving liberal, so when I first heard this, it almost sounded like some inherent conspiracy theory. Then I saw the kinds of degrees that the Koch Brothers got and I was impressed, even though on the same Wikipedia article I looked at, they had gotten a lot of negative press for pipeline accident that happened in 1996, along with their lobbying efforts. It seems like the right wing also has their equivalent of the so-called Koch Brothers boogey man with investor George Soros and his lobbying efforts. I don't know who to believe on this matter.
The same guy who brought this up also had a problem with how Hayek and Friedman won the Nobel Prizes for economics back in the 70s and directed me to the Wikipedia article on the subject and the protests from the left back then.
Here's an excellent article about the Koch Brothers from Forbes, which I found very informative which gave me a different, refreshing perspective on them. They also get a lot of criticism for not publicly offering their shares.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2012/12/05/inside-the-koch-empire-how-the-brothers-plan-to-reshape-america/
I need to clarify one statement. When I said, "in many cases justifiably so", I was referring to the left being justified on the whole Obama guilt by association thing, not that the right-wing was justified in tarring Obama. Just to correct the record there.
As for the Koch brothers, I have nothing against them other than the fact that they often support Republicans who are consistently anathema to their supposedly libertarian ideals. Compare that to the scholars at the Cato institute (an entity which the Koch brothers supposedly started) who I suspect probably/mostly voted for Johnson.
I have nothing against the Koch brothers generously embracing the idea of public service, and giving a lot of their own money to support many positive policies.
In Michigan, recently, they helped make a legislative effort to give workers the choice of whether or not to join unions successful.
Anti-workers-rights groups strongly opposed this effort, and to this day in the Michigan press they grumble and tar the 90% of workers who earn an honest living without the benefit of unions as "freeloaders".
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