I love it Chiquito. I love it. Climate change denial. Now you have Australia burning itself to death and still trying to hold China off. All the while Mother Earth is having hot flashes. Originally Posted by eccieuser9500I watched all of your first video and half of the second. Bernie Sanders and Christopher Leonard are full of shit. The Koch Brothers provided support to a number of Libertarian oriented think tanks and other organizations and David was a Vice Presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. So these bozos go back to 1980 to the Libertarian Party platform and take every position paper that the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity published, take what they read out of context, and do a hit piece on these American Heroes.
As to Sander's lies, the Citizens United case was about freedom of speech. Citizens United wanted to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton before the Democratic Convention in 2008. The Supreme Court said they could do it. And by extension, if, say, you and I want to contribute to an entity that criticizes Trump, we can do it. Entities like nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations have freedom of speech. There's a huge amount of hypocrisy from the Democratic Party about this. They benefitted from Citizens United more than the Republicans. Where were the Democrats when Michael Moore was making his hit piece on George Bush?
Sanders claims the Koch's believe there should be no taxes of any type. That's bull shit.
He says they want to do away with Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. Now it wouldn't surprise me at all if the Cato Institute or some other Koch-supported organization has come out with papers and position pieces critical of those programs, perhaps wanting to replace Social Security, a Ponzi scheme, with something like Australia's superannuation scheme, where people would have their own pension accounts. Or ideas about how to improve the health care system, which badly needs it. We spend much more on health care than virtually all other countries, but outcomes aren't any better than Cuba. If someone at Cato comes up with an idea as to how to improve social security, Medicare, or the postal service that involves free markets, then I guess in Sander's world that means the Kochs need to be shut down. Especially if this would impede the political class' ability to control us.
As to climate, Leonard twists the positions of many Libertarians like the Koch's. Yes, there are some who are deniers. But the main criticism of Americans for Prosperity (Koch funded organization) is that it opposed cap and trade, and didn't want a carbon tax unless revenues from it were used to reduce the income tax. This is a wise position. Cap and trade is an inefficient, bureaucratic system that just puts more power in the government. A carbon tax would allow the market to work. And you've got to get money to run the government from somewhere. In terms of necessary evils, it's probably a better option than raising more money from the income tax.
What Leonard and Sanders want to do is take jobs away from millions of Americans who work in oil and gas. Some of them are friends of mine. And for what? What difference is that going to make in the level of worldwide carbon emissions? Not that much. The future is in the hands of China, which is the world's #1 emitter and still building more coal generation plants, and other developing countries.
Koch Industries makes chemicals, owns pipelines, and refines oil. Take a look about a third of the way down this page for products made possible by petroleum. You probably use 10 or 20 every day:
https://innovativewealth.com/inflati...e-of-gasoline/
Gas pipelines and gas production have caused carbon emissions in the USA to go down more in % terms in the last decade or two than they have in many European and other developed countries.
Oil production, pipelines and refining in the USA are very beneficial to our economy. You want to just buy it from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela?
In summary, Koch Industries and other companies like them have considerably improved our prosperity and quality of life.
Bernie Sanders and Christopher Leonard want to make it where my friends who work in energy can't feed their families. Unless of course they take handouts from the federal government, thus further making them slaves of the political class.
