{"id":26037,"date":"2014-05-30T08:27:06","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T13:27:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26037"},"modified":"2014-05-30T08:27:06","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T13:27:06","slug":"new-book-exposes-the-koch-brothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/05\/30\/new-book-exposes-the-koch-brothers\/","title":{"rendered":"New book exposes the Koch brothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nick Gillespie<\/a> in the Daily Beast<\/em>, recommending that everyone read the new expos\u00e9 by Mother Jones<\/em> senior editor Daniel Schulman. But not for the reasons you’d expect:<\/p>\n

\"Clark-KochAs a libertarian, I\u2019m always slow to tell people what they should do. But if you care about politics and the ultimately far more powerful cultural direction of these United States, the new book by Daniel Schulman, Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America\u2019s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty<\/em> is mandatory reading.<\/p>\n

Written by a senior editor for the lefty magazine Mother Jones<\/em>, the book is hugely revelatory, though not in a way that will please or flatter the conspiracy theories of Democrats, liberals, and progressives who vilify the Kansas-raised billionaires Charles and David Koch for fun and profit. Sons of Wichita chronicles the post-World War II transformation of a mid-size oil-and-ranching family business into the second-largest privately held company in the United States. From a straight business angle, it\u2019s riveting and illuminating not just about how Koch Industries \u2014 makers of \u201cenergy, food, building and agricultural materials\u2026and\u2026products [that] intersect every day with the lives of every American\u201d \u2014 evolved over the past 60 years but also how the larger U.S. economy changed and globalized.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s far more interesting \u2014 and important to contemporary America \u2014 is the way in which Schulman documents the absolute seriousness with which Charles and David have always taken specifically libertarian ideas and their signal role in helping to create a \u201cfreedom movement\u201d to counter what they have long seen as a more effective mix of educational, activist, and intellectual groups on the broadly defined left. By treating the Koch brothers\u2019 activities in critical but fair terms, Sons of Wichita points to what I like to think of as Libertarianism 3.0, a political and cultural development that, if successful, will not only frustrate the left but fundamentally alter the right by creating fusion between forces of social tolerance and fiscal responsibility.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nick Gillespie in the Daily Beast, recommending that everyone read the new expos\u00e9 by Mother Jones senior editor Daniel Schulman. But not for the reasons you’d expect: As a libertarian, I\u2019m always slow to tell people what they should do. But if you care about politics and the ultimately far more powerful cultural direction of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,13],"tags":[127,550,315],"class_list":["post-26037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-usa","tag-conspiracytheories","tag-libertarianism","tag-wealth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6LX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26037"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26037\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26039,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26037\/revisions\/26039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}