ZeroHedge.com<\/p>\n
The\u00a0Martens<\/a>\u00a0find PropOrNot background ties to the billionaire Koch brothers, to the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, to the Sarah Scaife Foundation (the Mellon fortune), ExxonMobil, US Senators Chris Murphy and Rob Portman, who tie into Citigroup and Goldman Sachs, \u201ctwo Wall Street behemoths that would very much like to pivot the national debate to anything other than Wall Street power and corruption.\u201d \u2013Paul Craig Roberts<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The recent naming of 200 websites and writers by PropOrNot as agents of Russian disinformation can only be fully appreciated as an explosion ripping through the pages of history and revealing a millennia-old struggle between freedom and repression.<\/p>\n
The Koch Brothers and Scaife exercise considerable control over the \u201cmoderate\u201d libertarian media including the famous Cato Institute think tank and the leading libertarian magazine Reason.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the more vigorous and successful (in the 21st\u00a0 century) faction of libertarianism\u00a0has been anarcho-capitalism, championed notably in modern times by Lew Rockwell and his mentor Murray Rothbard, an important student of the great Ludwig von Mises himself.<\/p>\n
Mises\u2019s writings further established the problems\u00a0of state control by analyzing them through the lens of human action, marginal utility and business cycles. These are explosive insights that are once again\u00a0under formal attack in some quarters even though the marginal utility, especially, is accepted throughout modern economics. (You can see recent articles of ours\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here.<\/a>)<\/p>\n
Rothbard in fact helped found the Cato Institute before leaving after a fight with the Koch Brothers over ideology and direction. Rothbard and Rockwell then founded the Mises Institute. Lew Rockwell went on to found LewRockwell.com, the eponymous and successful libertarian web-publication.<\/p>\n
It never made sense that LewRockwell.com was listed on the PropOrNot website as a disseminator of Russian propaganda (not that any of it makes sense). But if the Koch Brothers and Scaife (through his foundation) are behind PropOrNot it all becomes a lot clearer. At least partially, this would seem to be a furtherance of the Koch vs. Rothbard feud. Congressman Ron Paul, a good friend of Rothbard\u2019s was listed as well.<\/p>\n
One way or another many of the often important and passionate websites on the PropOrNot list are grounded (whether they know it or not \u2013 or even would admit it) in the Austrian, free-market vision so eloquently (and often voluminously) documented by Mises in such great works as Human Action.<\/p>\n
Mises\u2019s books have had such an impact \u2013 once the Internet came along and they censorship ceased to be effective \u2013 because his codification of \u00a0human action and business cycles rehearse the age-old confrontation between freedom and tyranny and even, in its largest application, good and evil.<\/p>\n
The PropOrNot list is therefore history\u2019s reverberation, an echo of these larger confrontations. It is so very shocking because it confronts us once again with humanity\u2019s larger struggle.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, there are other issues to consider that are slightly more mundane however. Again, both Roberts (above) and the Martens believe the Kochs and Scaife are behind PropOrNot, especially based on PropOrNot\u2019s recommendations and the language used in some of PropOrNot\u2019s statements \u2013 among other reasons. If this is so, then both Cato and Reason (the magazine and Foundation) are in some sense participative in the libel of some 200 websites and a former almost-successful presidential candidate Ron Paul.<\/p>\n
If this is true, shouldn\u2019t Cato and Reason make every effort to find out the truth? If it is true, shouldn\u2019t they then disassociate themselves from Koch and Scaife and refuse further funding? Prominent libertarian and free-market scholars sitting on the boards or trustee organizations of these groups should also try to find out what\u2019s going on and speak out on the subject.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve mentioned Rand Paul in particular, see\u00a0here.<\/a>\u00a0As a Senator whose father has been directly attacked by PropOrNot, shouldn\u2019t he do what he can to find out who\u2019s behind PropOrNot and if it really is the Kochs and the Scaife Foundation? \u00a0The silence seems well \u2026 \u201cdeafening,\u201d yet the issues could not be more important. They are as old as time and as integral to humanity as history itself.<\/p>\n