As dim Americans continue to stare blankly through the hazy toxic clouds of cable news teevee noise-static and ask, “hennnrrhhggh why are all the Wall Street protester hippies against capitalism and freedom, hrnngghh,” the intrepid reporter-folks over at The Nation meanwhile managed to uncover a series of letters from the 1970s indicating that America’s most noxious billionaire kleptocrat demon space lizards the Koch Brothers briefly abandoned their scheme to dismantle the social safety net for the half-hour or so it took them to write socialist propaganda pamphlet-screeds trying to convince an ill Austrian economist covered under his country’s universal health care program that he wouldn’t die in the United States if he came to work for them, because he was eligible for Medicare.
From The Nation report:
[Ultra-conservative economist Friedrich] Hayek initially declined Koch’s offer. In a letter to IHS secretary Kenneth Templeton Jr., dated June 16, 1973, Hayek explains that he underwent gall bladder surgery in Austria earlier that year, which only heightened his fear of “the problems (and costs) of falling ill away from home.” (Thanks to waves of progressive reforms, postwar Austria had near universal healthcare and robust social insurance plans that Hayek would have been eligible for.)
IHS vice president George Pearson (who later became a top Koch Industries executive) responded three weeks later, conceding that it was all but impossible to arrange affordable private medical insurance for Hayek in the United States. However, thanks to research by Yale Brozen, a libertarian economist at the University of Chicago, Pearson happily reported that “social security was passed at the University of Chicago while you [Hayek] were there in 1951. You had an option of being in the program. If you so elected at that time, you may be entitled to coverage now.”
A few weeks later, the institute reported the good news: Professor Hayek had indeed opted into Social Security while he was teaching at Chicago and had paid into the program for ten years. He was eligible for benefits. On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America. He also assured Hayek that Medicare, which had been created in 1965 by the Social Security amendments as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, would cover his medical needs.
Read the rest of the article, sob, rage, do whatever you have to do to get it out, and then start all over again when you remember that the Koch Brothers’ net worth rose $10 billion in the last year alone. [The Nation]
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Why am I not surprised!
Because hardcore libertarians and teabaggers all tend to be massive hypocrites (neo-cons, too, but in slightly different ways). Cobble together a philosphical framework that can be boiled down to "I got mine, screw you". When they need something, however, instead of facing the logical outcomes of their own philosophy, they stick their hand out for the rest of us to pay.
Yeah, back in the day, Owsley Stanley made some mighty good acid. And the Kochs loved it.
Hypocritical douche bags are hypocritical.
Its like when people claim to be into recycling but you should see their faces when you rinse out a condom.
So many up-fists.; so many dirty condoms.
(BTW…we just said "rubbers" back in the day, 'cause we were "like that"").
I'm sorry…grammar nightmare…are all the commas and parentheses in the right spot?
Again…fist( uwardly). Used condom. Rubber.
jeezus…that's why i needed help.
fist went "upwardly"…Please pardon my Palin-spell. Thanks. Also. Too.
Nice alt_text; although I think 716183456_156679.
Yeah, I was gonna say "alt-text win!" but yours is really much better.
'Course it's fixed now so that doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, but at least we get it. It'll be seen as some kind of weird inside joke by everyone else here.
I don't get it.
Are you sure? I thought it was 716183456_156678.
With such wanton pandering it sounds like the Kock Bros are getting ready for this weekend's NYC Slutwalk. What will Riley be wearing to drive Brietfart over the edge at an Occupy Wall Street / Slutwalk doubledown?
Tears.
no irony either when ayn rand cashed in on Medicare to treat the Invisible Hand of Lung Disease.
Wonder what she thought about how the market ultimately resolved her situation.
This was before the Surgeon General destroyed all those jobs in the tobacco industry.
Oncologists create jobs! For undertakers!
They weren't any different than they are now, just using the government to save their own money. They coulda told the guy they'd pay for it, I mean, you CAN pay cash for shit around here…
That truly is the crux of it. They want the guy on their team so bad they are willing to coach him through the ins and outs of working the system but they aren't willing to simply pay for his medical care. Unbelievable.
Hey, if it was good enough for that fucking Nazi Ayn Rand.
Typical reaction by free-market champion Hayek: Don't take away my government benefits! What the fuck is it that these "conservatives" want the government not to do? They're for war and military spending, more police and larger prisons and want to get as much as possible from that cash cow, yet they have the gall to decry budget deficits.
privatize every service the government handles that could be profitable for a business to run and hand these services over to their donors. somehow i doubt the price of stamps will decrease–free market or not. just my take on it, is all.
In fairness to Hayek, he was explicitly in favor of government sponsored social and health insurance, and he gave considered reasons for this position. His contemporary American followers have just skimmed his writings in the most superficial way and fastened on only the parts of his work that fits their antecedent prejudices. A bit like the way they read the Bible and Adam Smith.
Not to mention the Constitution.
Or even Fox news: Out of that entire slough of infantile propaganda, your average Tea Partier seems to retain only the bottom 5% of truly weapons-grade idiocy.
Hayek and along with him social security inventor Bismarck (and I mean Otto von, not ND)
What the fuck don't the conservatives want the government to do? Why, anything that benefits the poors is out, of course: we have to focus on the needs of the people. And by people, they mean corporations of course.
Jerks.
This guy Friedrich Hayek is to economics as Ayn Rand is to popular fiction. The Road to Derp-dom.
Shit jerbs is for the poor — gubbmint healthcare is fer the jerb-creators. derpa derp derp…
To be fair, in 1973 the Kock brothers hadn't fucked everything up yet.
Hayek was the mega-dick who the most pretentiously pseudo-intellectual Libertarian douches like to refer to with "You don't understand the Austrian school of economics!", to which the proper response is, "No, you obviously don't understand it, because if you did you'd realize it was a crock of bullshit." Knowing that he, like the Prophet Ayn, violated his own idiotic principals and accepted government health care is delicious.
Beware of these Austrian schools – not so sure about old Sigmund either.
Sigmund was right about one thing: EVERYTHING is about sex.
Meaning that sometimes people who suck up to guys named Koch really are Cocksuckers?
Everything is about sex, except of course sex, which is really about Sophoclean Drama.
What about Austrian schoolgirls? Are they OK?
Only if you are their father.
Too soon!
These are Germanic people, so I think it depends on if you're into S&M.
Oh no, Austrian schoolgirls who need to be spanked. What ever will I do?
Um … Germans are a LOT more into scat porn, I'm afraid.
"Don't worry about losing your gall bladder. We've got a lot of gall."
It's hard to think of anything you can't blame on the University of Chicago: founded by the Rockefellers, fattened by meatpacking heirs, over-reliance on "the classics" as the basis of liberal education, and — what was that other one? — oh yeah, Milton Friedman, Greenspan, and the "Chicago School" of economics, in whose financial ruins we all now reside.
And, most egregious of all, Leo Strauss and his Neoconservative Clown Corps. What a horribly assholey school.
Plus the campus is a neoclassical potpourri of borrowed Gothic stickons, a ghetto of wealthy Jews (e.g. Saul Bellow) and beardo intellectuals (e.g. Obama's terrorist pal Bill Ayers, sworn enemy of capitalism and son of the chairman of Commonwealth Edison Co) surrounded by an authentic ghetto of poor black people.
Well, let's put things in perspective: many of us share one or more of those same attributes
Hey, Obama used to teach there. Oh wait, that kinda explains the last three years, doesn't it?
Don't forget "The Bomb". Chi U was critical in developing that tool.
Right you are! Under the bleachers at Stagg Field, named for the famous football coach who was such a cheater the school quit football for 40 years in shame. So we can blame them for corrupt big-time college football too.
But hey that's just the econ department; the rest of my old school is fine (well the business school is also full of douchebags, but that's true every B-school that has existed or will ever exist). And remember that Obama was a professor there.
When I was looking for a college to attend, a catalog from U of C had a picture of some bearded students playing touch football, captioned "Flying Bolsheviks vs Robber Barons," which seemed like the coolest thing imaginable. Obviously I needed more education about the concept of "irony."
and i have a soft spot for jimmy's.
but then i would.
Roughly 3,000 Chileans would second that assessment. If they weren't dead.
You forgot one: an astronomical amount of ego and pretentiousness
And Gary Becker!
So this uber-conservative money man wouldn't leave his country because every one gets health care then comes to the US and sponges off us because the Cock brothers wouldn't pay his medical expenses to be thier mouth piece? FUCKETY FUCK FUCK & FUCK ONCE AGAIN!
If you even have a rudimentary knowledge of actuarial science you know that insurance companies could not possibly afford to offer insurance to those 65 and older. A full 50% of medical costs occur in the last year of life it takes a lifetime of premiums to cover it.
An equally rudimentary familiarity with economics and how the world works would make you realize that he young pay for the oldz. How long this will last is anybody's guess, but my past premiums hardly cover my current expenses.
That puts the recent description of Social Security as a Ponzi scheme into a new perspective. Given that, due to inflation,the health care expenses of the current cohort of elderly can't possibly be covered by whatever premiums they may have paid when young then the private health insurance system is, like the public one, merely a Ponzi scheme in which today's expenditures are covered by the money paid in by the latest batch of suckers.
It's not a matter of "inflation" in the sense the term is commonly used. Healthcare costs are ballooning because healthcare is changing. It's like transportation that used to be a lot cheaper before there were cars and planes. People today travel faster and live longer. The problem is that the market system is not designed for healthcare and yet the industry is largely in private hands. If you can figure out how to resolve this issue, you can be my leader.
Healthcare costs are ballooning because the healthcare industry profits from overcapacity. Here's an example in Michigan, where "everybody will be 10 minutes away from a hospital". Ridiculous. And who pays the cost? The federal government. http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/20…
Despite the retoric healthcare is and will continue to be fully paid by the tax payers, whether by direct payments, taxes or insurance premiums. The Republicans simply want to be sure the middle class pays twice, by paying taxes and premiums. I would rather have my premium set by an elected body than a person whose goal is to maximize profits.
That understanding (plus my years of toil in the health insurance industry) led to my conclusion that private health insurance just doesn't work. And don't give me any of that "works in Switzerland" crap … they actually regulate insurance companies there.
EeeeeLeeeetist, with your crazy liberal science and math!
Oral Roberts was active by the '70s; they should've arranged for him to be "healed" by the Master!
Those eyeless, crepuscular faces & horns in the stuffed shirts… I feel like I just saw them recently.. clinking champagne glasses and tut-tuting & looking literally down their noses at yonder irksome debaucle a few flights below.
I'm also assuming that because Hayek is Austrian, he''s more than likely white; hence, it's perfectly okay for him to receive the largess of Government benefits. Per "conservatives" that makes him a "producer". Fuckers.
I wonder if he used more drugs than 97.5% of welfare recipients in Florida?
Oh you KNOW that dude was all Boeing Employeed out…
The Kock boyz don't mind government intervention at all, they've made a lot of money by that means, they just want to be the beneficiaries, not the ones footing the bill. Their ideology, such as it is, can be summed up as fuck you I've got mine.
Austria eh? G'day mate. Throw another shrimp on the barbie.
Do you want a Brown Delicious to the face?
No, no, kuchen mit schlag!
"Read the rest of the article, sob, rage, do whatever you have to do to get it out, and then start all over again when you remember that the Koch Brothers’ net worth rose $10 billion in the last year alone."
Takes money to make money!1!!
Am in ur base fukin up ur gubermen
KBJ is becoming as bleak and depressing as Layne. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Wonkette—come for the buttsechs, stay for the clinical depression!!!
Ass-fucking. Wonkette had me at "ass-fucking."
That's what I'M talking about…wait…no, yeah, that's pretty much it.
No use fighting it.
Libertarians only raise one fist against the government, because the other is busy picking pockets.
Weird Letters Show Kochs Briefly Drank Libtard Juice In Seventies
And all this time we've been blaming Jimmy Carter for The Malaise.
Koch Industries – Hypocrisy is our most important product!
You know who else was Austrian and fucked with US America politics?
Arnold Schwarzenegger?
It's not a rumah!
Ooooh, sneaky.
Freud the Merciless?
Kurt Waldheim?
Bruno?
Franz Ferdinand? The Decembrists?
Dr. Evil?
(Edit: nope, according to the Wiki he's from Belgium. Who knew?)
Joe Zawinul?
Mercy, mercy, mercy!
The Third Man?
Sounds like Ponzi scheme to me. Nothing but a Koch con.
Ponzicare!
That's it?! Using slightly-paid-for healthcare as a selling point to get an economist to visit the country is the big skeleton in their right-wing closet? Sheeeeit, they're corporate greedheads — they'd probably offer their own mother to a cannibal if he was a professor who backed up their ideas about stealing everything you possibly can — it's not an ethical lapse, it's what assholes like this do.
Oh, they're probably also having sex with animals but we expect that sort of thing from conservatives.
I don't really find the mentality of climbing the greasy pole to get yours while trying screw everyone else out of the same thing is inconsistent with anything else the Koch brothers have done.
Jesus Fuck, man, Hayek and the gibbering insane Austrian School economists are the authors of the gibbering insane Ron Paul economic doctrine of insanity. Paultards and libertarians and gold-standard cranks worship Hayek, this was no hypocracy, the Cocks wanted Hayek (my cock wants Hayek, too, but its Salma it wants) and they wanted to externalize the cost of caring for him onto the public. Perfectly good modern capitalism, privatize profits, socialize expenses.
They really wanted Ludwig von Mises, but their deal with the Devil doesn't include resurrection of the dead.
They may have been happy with third-choice Moses or fourth option Ludwig van Beethoven.
Cliffs: Man spends life seeking Galt's Gulch. When he gets there, he learns it is actually terrible. Disregard everything else man has ever said. The end.
Sic Semper Chicago Boys.
Sigh…I miss Mike Royko. Studs Terkel, too. And Bellow. Really miss Saul Bellow.
Now don't you go muddying the Evil-Good waters. Not on a Friday.
I know…I miss Muddy Waters, too. Now THERE'S a Chicagoan.
Sure come on over and enjoy that 37th ranked health care system, it is only 5 spots behind Austraila
It's Not Hypocrisy If You're A Libertarian
Libertarians – We can do any goddam thing we want!
Yeah, and then they go running around like Roger Daltrey hollering ♫"I'm FREE!"♫
Asperger's Syndrome: Catch the Fever!
Ed Koch must have had a flashback, since he declared his support for President Obama's re-election campaign.
It helps to have a Great Satan to rally against.
If Hayek had had to live under socialized medicine, he'd be dead now!
Fersure, the Death Panels would have fixed his ass.
Sideways Chainsaw Anal's new song: Suck my Libtard Juice! On sale now!
Did you change your band's name already? I thought it was Sideways Chainsaw Assfuck.
The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. Do I know you?
As Hayeks go, I'll take Salma over Friedrich any day.
I'll take Salma over the back of a sofa, over my desk, hell, I'd take Salma any and every way, the viler the better, too.
And then the poor hapless duo got "mugged by a librul", as the story goes, right?
KBJ, that was a long sentence. I'm going to take a break and read it one more time.
I noticed that too. Longest … first sentence … ever.
KBJ is fond of long opening sentences which lure you in, building suspense as you wonder how she will unwind it into a coherent conclusion with a punch! I'll bet she's a Scorpio.
She's the Phish of snarky punditry.
You need to upgrade your FIrefox. The oxygen mask should have descended.
OT
Former Wonkette Ed Alex Pereene, who now is a janitor or something over at the Saloon, says that Dame Peggyton Noonerton is full of shit. Say it isn't true.
Hayek? Let him die!
*Wild audience applause*
'"Hypocrisy" seems so quaint in these, the latter days.
This is so totally on-topic, I just have to tell you all my latest news (I am so fascinating to myself, I assume I must be equally fascinating to everyone else as well). Last night I started watching Breaking Bad, from the beginning, on Netflix, and I am madly in love with this show! But, I am slightly worried. More than slightly. Yes indeedy, it is almost 'inspiring" to me. I see it as a happy tale of empowerment and success. He is my new hero. I watched 5 episodes.
Hahaha, just kidding, of course, no chance I am going to go start up a meth-cooking business, just doing my usual ironic posturing in the character of a burnt-out drunken mid-life middle class deeply lecherous trotskyite nihilist. Yeah, thats what I'm doing, he told himself, its a character I have created, yeah, its not ME saying these things.
Besides, I'm not a chemist.
I don't know of a single teapublican who hates SS or medicare…they just think it should be for free….yes for free. Never be fooled..they love free-loading…
They could have tried to wean old Hayek from the teat of single payer, state subsidized, tax financed and free at the point of delivery health care with, for example, a million dollars in an escrow account to pay for his medical needs here but chose not to.
I am shocked at such hypocrisy by these pillars of finance capital.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
deep breath, wipe away tears of laughter
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…
Fuckwits like these two have no core beliefs or standards. They would gladly suck Elephant Dicks for a Dime a herd if they had no cash.
Nick Gillespie is probably probably sweating into…{let me go out out on a limb here) his black pants/shirt/jacket/ ensemble at this very moment.
Sorry, you're not part of me and Sorosbot's clique.
Splitters!
May I please join your clique? I have a Little Debbie.
I LOVE Little Debbies! My favorites are the Swiss Rolls!
You can join my clique, if you wanna!
"How much do you hate the Romans?"
"A lot!!"
"Right. You're in."
Trying to bribe us with snacks, are you? Well that won't work!
OK yes it will.
Can I have a Little Debbie Rolling in the Hay?
Here you go: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf7JiRmix88
Okay, I paid my dues of $750.00 to the Pay Pay address Soros gave me. Now I will just sit back and watch the magic happen.
So there was this vaudeville family act auditioning for a talent agent . . .
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