Charles Koch: This is the one issue where Bernie Sanders is right

Washington Post ^ | 02/19/2016 | Charles Koch, chairman and chief executive of Koch Industries.

[SeekAndFind]

As he campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) often sounds like he's running as much against me as he is the other candidates. I have never met the senator, but I know from listening to him that we disagree on plenty when it comes to public policy.

Even so, I see benefits in searching for common ground and greater civility during this overly negative campaign season. That's why, in spite of the fact that he often misrepresents where I stand on issues, the senator should know that we do agree on at least one — an issue that resonates with people who feel that hard work and making a contribution will no longer enable them to succeed.

The senator is upset with a political and economic system that is often rigged to help the privileged few at the expense of everyone else, particularly the least advantaged. He believes that we have a two-tiered society that increasingly dooms millions of our fellow citizens to lives of poverty and hopelessness. He thinks many corporations seek and benefit from corporate welfare while ordinary citizens are denied opportunities and a level playing field.

I agree with him.

Democrats and Republicans have too often favored policies and regulations that pick winners and losers. This helps perpetuate a cycle of control, dependency, cronyism and poverty in the United States. These are complicated issues, but it's not enough to say that government alone is to blame. Large portions of the business community have actively pushed for these policies.

Consider the regulations, handouts, mandates, subsidies and other forms of largesse our elected officials dole out to the wealthy and well-connected. The tax code alone contains $1.5 trillion in exemptions and special-interest carve-outs. Anti-competitive regulations cost businesses an additional $1.9 trillion every year.

[lentulusgracchus]

Hence most of or fellow citizens have decided that the "free market" is a crock.

It started before the 2007-2009 market melt, long before.

The cronyism and back-rubbing began after the 1987 Crash; by 1995 we were hearing whispers about "the Greenspan Put", which gradually coarsened into the money-bombing of "Helicopter Ben" Bernanke. Plots against gold, killer Punisher strikes against the commodities market to prop up the dollar and kill the people hedging against Greenspan's/Bernanke's "repression" policies -- the house is crooked, the dice are crooked, the games are rigged. How many ways are there to say it? Goldman Sachs shall be served, and what they are served are the broken and barbecued bodies of savers, investors, and traders. Long live the Great Vampire Squid, and tough luck to everybody else.

[lentulusgracchus]

...they are essentially the only moneyed interest which is resolutely pro-market instead of pro-business.

Not just significant, but a huge distinction -- and trust you to be the one to suss it out and point it out to us.

Subtle but Yuuuuge .... Truth in advocacy, I am an ordoliberal myself, which is all about honest markets and plenty of honest cops to keep elbows out of scales.

To recover honest markets, we'd have to start by making the Fed go away. Goldman and Morgan Stanley have been enjoying the free use of the nation's Black Card since before the market melt of eight years ago, courtesy of "Helicopter Ben".

The Big Short shows us some of the stuff that was going on that the market melt should have corrected and discounted properly, but the Fed and Pres. Bush jumped in to forefend a global bankruptcy (of the biggest banks, true, but not all of them: some 8000 banks in the U.S. that had not been gorging on CMO's and CDS's were unaffected) by throwing a Niagara of public money (TARP) at the biggest banks. As an intended result of TARP, we never achieved genuine price discovery. So we never corrected the excesses of the previous 15 years.

[Grimmy]

re: the constant call for “civility”...

It is a moral failure to ever give commiescum any grace in any way ever on any subject.

The entire program of commiescumism is based on pure bullcrap and is completely destructionist in every aspect of society.

To give any one of them an inch on any issue at any time in any place for any reason is to give them ground that will, eventually, have to be bought back in bloodshed.