Politico reports:
Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch, the deep-pocketed conservative activists, launched a court fight yesterday over control of the Cato Institute, one of the nation’s best-known free-market think tanks.
The Washington-based public-policy group was founded in 1974 as the Charles Koch Foundation. The name was changed to Cato in 1976, with the Koch brothers as longstanding contributors. The group had four shareholders until last year: Charles Koch; David Koch; Edward H. Crane III, Cato’s president; and William A. Niskanen, who died in October. Niskanen, who once was acting chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers, was Cato’s chairman emeritus.
Koch officials tell POLITICO that the brothers think the shareholder agreement is clear that there should now only be three shareholders, while Crane thinks Niskanen’s 25-percent control should go to his widow, Kathryn Washburn.
Honest question: Why does this matter? What's the benefit of being a shareholder of a non-profit? (I'm assuming Cato is non-profit. I think contributions are deductible.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou get to control the direction the agency takes.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIt's funny that the Koch Brothers get branded as "conservative", when upon closer examination, the much more closely resemble libertarians, or classical liberals perhaps.
I think, but am not positive, that they support homosexual marriage, and I'm not sure if they have any (public) position on abortion. But to read the papers, you'd think that they were like Tom Monaghan or Pat Buchanan. They aren't, at all.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou might more accurately have said "when upon actually giving any sort of thought at all to this classification".... In Politico's view, "Conservative" is just a label for anyone whose ideology fails to support government intervention as the first recourse to any issue.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseOff to court. Good court, I guess. Not bad court.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI really don't care who takes control of CATO. I gave up on them during the last presidential election cycle when I got a long fundraising letter going on about fighting NeoCon this and NeoCon that. It had the smack of anti-semitism about it and I wondered if they had lost their ever loving minds, and I also wondered why they picked that point to go all-in against the Republicans and essentially base their fundraising (and mild push-polling) on anti-Bush animus.
I didn't like Bush much but the idea that there is any sort of libertarian thought in this country outside some precincts on the right is... well, you'd have to be one of the pr*no & pot libertarians to believe that.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe Koch brothers play hardball, in both their business activities and their nonprofit pursuits.
Maybe that's what you want from leaders of a movement, but a thinktank like Cato should be a bit more open and collegial, methinks.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow does this action prevent Cato from being open and collegial?
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