"Freedom" thread or something

When Texas Governor Rick Perry, a front-runner in the Republican primary for president, derides Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” or a “monstrous lie,” that rhetoric can be traced back to the work of Hayek and Koch. And yet we now know that in private practice, Hayek was perfectly content to pay into Social Security and that Koch encouraged him to draw upon both Social Security and Medicare. Did they really believe what they wrote? Or were these attacks just scare-talk meant for the rubes, for you and us, “the public”?

Calling this mere hypocrisy downplays the seriousness of their fraud. Koch and Hayek are no more hypocritical than the used-car salesman who knowingly sells a lemon to a gullible buyer, or the financial agency that rates “AAA” instruments it knows are crap. This is a grand swindle played on a trusting, gullible public, a scam whose goal is to con America’s dying middle class into handing over their retirement money to the richest 0.1 percent, convincing them that in doing so, they’re “empowering” themselves and protecting their “individual liberty.”

Another question hangs over all this: Why didn’t Charles Koch offer to put up some of his enormous wealth to pay for Hayek’s temporary medical insurance? One obvious answer: because the state had already offered a better and freer program. But perhaps Koch’s stinginess also reveals the social ethic behind libertarian values: every man for himself; selfishness is a virtue.