Posted on 09/22/2011 1:07:25 PM PDT by Vintage Freeper
Market Based Management Applied to Politics
"We've learned to articulate the ideas of liberty a lot better, but we haven't learned to turn that into political effectiveness." Charles Koch
To the Messers Koch:
Sadly, your conclusion is still compatible with Ronald Reagan's fateful 1964 prophecy, "We have come to a time for choosing; we will preserve for our children this the last best hope for man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.....history will record with the greatest astonishment that those who had the most to lose did the least to prevent its happening." But gratifyingly, the concepts found on this and subsequent pages have the potential to not only put the fate of the United States and the rest of the world into your hands, but also the means to ensure that our shared fate is a renaissance. These pages will also provide the means that can not only make this possible, but also the means that might be able to prevent the US and the world from continuing to repeat the mistakes of the past by blocking the ability of bankers and politicians to revert to their customarily errant ways. These pages crystallize the implied challenge in both President Reagan's and your quotes into actionable means of enlightening voters to see the correct path when choosing between politically obscured choices that have historically produced results that appeared to be random, but that could be either a dark ages or a renaissance.
The first step toward political effectiveness is asking the right questions and the second is acting on the logically correct answers:
What's wrong with America?
The right people don't run.
What's wrong with the current people who do run?
They believe that government should tax the rich so that it can help the poor and the less fortunate.
How can We the people know these are the correct questions and that the answers are true? Because countless credible experts have been telling us this for not just hundreds, but thousands of years:
Plato (428-347BC: "This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector."
Plutarch (46-120AD): "The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits."
William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth Colony,1623: Socialism came to America with the Mayflower in 1620. After a winter of starvation under the philosophy of share and share alike, the pilgrims resorted to capitalism with each colonist benefiting from the fruits of their own labor in order to promote a more bountiful harvest before facing their next winter. The First Thanksgiving can, and should be viewed as a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism.
Benjamin Franklin: "A republic if you can keep it....When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
John Adams, most influential member of the Continental Congress, Second President: "Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide."
Thomas Jefferson, Third President: "I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them...If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them [around the banks], will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, Fourth President, 1792: "I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents."
Congressman Davy Crockett, Alamo hero, 1830 in the House of Representatives:
"Mr. Speaker, I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, as any man in this House. But we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right to so appropriate a dollar of the public money."
Frederick Bastiat, The Law 1850:
"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."
Franklin Pierce, 14th President 1854:
"[I must question] the constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those … who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded."
Grover Cleveland, 22nd President 1887: "I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit."
Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt 1930: "As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject (prohibition), but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere."
Mark Twain: "The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivalry of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in time, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise."
Ludwig von Mises, Economist, 1931: "Capitalism has raised the standard of life among the masses to a level which our ancestors could not have imagined. Interventionism and efforts to introduce Socialism have been working now for some decades to shatter the foundations of the world economic system. We stand on the brink of a precipice which threatens to engulf our civilization. Whether civilized humanity will perish forever or whether the catastrophe will be averted at the eleventh hour and the only possible way of salvation retraced—by which we mean the rebuilding of a society based on the unreserved recognition of private property in the means of production—is a question which concerns the generation destined to act in the coming decades, for it is the ideas behind their actions that will decide it....Our whole civilization rests on the fact that men have always succeeded in beating off the attack of the re-distributors.... If we wish to save the world from barbarism we have to conquer Socialism...."
Frederick von Hayek, 1974 Nobel Laureate in Economics: "When it becomes dominated by a collectivist creed, democracy will inevitably destroy itself."
Charles Koch paraphrased Ludwig von Mises in outlining the prerequisites for human action: (1) unease or dissatisfaction with the present state of affairs, (2) a vision of a better state, and (3) belief they can reach the better state.
Austrian economic theory tells us that both the Keynesian and monetarist's economic models and theories lead to booms and busts. History has established that socialism fails every time it has been tried and the reason given for attempting to repeat the mistake is always the same, the wrong people were in control. And the Austrians have also established that mixed economies inevitably lead to socialism. Freedom and laissez-faire capitalism are the path to renaissance and getting the right people to run is the key to making the Renaissance possible. Just as Austrian economics is the foundation for MBM, MBM provides the framework to understand how an American Renaissance can be initiated by changing a large body of Congressional law. MBM also leads to the understanding that major changes in the law are only made possible by completely changing the lawmakers who have instituted and tolerated socialism along with replacing or changing those who have been afraid to challenge socialism. MBM will also provide the framework to help people understand that what We the people have chosen to call the Reagan Wing of the Republican Party are in fact precisely the right people.
Who are the right people?
It's the people who can correctly provide the answer to the question, "who actually gets or enjoys the benefit of the wealth owned by the rich?"
The vital answer to this last question will be found in the next article.
Charles Koch's book, "The Science of Success", subtitled: "How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company", is largely Austrian economic theory applied to running a large complex business. Koch says the two books that have had the most impact on his life are Ludwig von Mises's, "Human Action" and FA Harper's, "Why Wages Rise". The free pdf version of Harper's book can be downloaded by clicking the following link: "Why Wages Rise". And html/pdf/text versions of Human Action are found by clicking this link: "Human Action". Harper's book can be read in a few hours; Human Action is a life-long study, but can be read in less than a week
The Kochs understand Austrian economics which are the economics of free-market capitalism. And they understand individual freedom which is a pre-requisite for free-market capitalism. Knowledge and economic understanding completely undermine socialism which can only exist on the basis of hope and hype, otherwise known as wishful thinking and propaganda. The socialists have a right, and should be afraid of Austrian economics in general and the Kochs in particular.
Koch Industries is on both twitter and facebook.
Please use the links above to help make them aware of this series being posted on FreeRepublic.
I think there is tragic truth to your comment. The power-seekers are all about power. Benefaction is merely a means to an end. Once they have consolidated their power, they no longer have as great a need for beneficiaries.
I have taken the liberty of adding your name to my ping list. By any chance does your handle imply any means, even remote means, of being able to contact the Kochs?
Thanks for the post/ping from Friday, October 07, 2011 4:00:03 PM “Gresham’s Law of Politicians”. That and your home page links brought me here. OUTSTANDING quotes. Many of the quotes I have never read before. The chronology is fascinating.
•Frederick Bastiat, The Law 1850:
“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”
Bastiat identified the destructive collective (socialists) and named names. He didn’t stay in the general. He got specific. He used some of their own words against them.
Yes, the collective gang (socialists/totalitarians) are all about control and domination (great post Christian Engineer Mass).
There is one guy (radio & internet tv) who is naming names every day of these individuals, their words and their supporters (besides the “useful idiots”).
The press and many people, the public if you will permit me to use the term, panicked when Perry labeled Social Security as a Ponzi scheme that is unconstitutional. The panic was precisely because the truth was being stated on a public platform where it would be heard by many.
One of the reasons you are not familiar with some of these quotes that clearly should be taught to every school child is because public education is an oxymoron. Public education is manipulated in a way that serves as the politician's propaganda machine paid for with tax dollars. Public schools are much closer to being brain-washing child daycare centers than most people realize or would even dare to consider.
There is a great deal more to come from Bastiat. Our soon to be published article on what makes "voting" important when it should actually be an essential right that is an enormous inconvenience that should most often be avoided comes straight from Bastiat's genius.
BUMP!
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