The billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama
This was on the front page here at LGF, followed by a front page post of an interview with its author, and I sadly had it in the tl;dr file until earlier this week, when I finally printed it and took it home to read. It’s one of the most interesting artcles I’ve read in a while. I post it here to catch anyone else who didn’t read it, and encourage them to take the time.
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Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”
That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box.
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Here’s a link to the interview.