This is not going to be libertarian friendly. From the blurb:
Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail, Christopher Leonard’s Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.
Charles Koch is a cronytarian who funds beltarians but this book will no doubt paint him as a libertarian.
The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and U.S. Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that’s because the billionaire Koch brothers want it that way.
For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies have made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.
But there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.
Seven years in the making, Kochland reads like a true-life thriller, with larger-than-life characters driving the battles on every page. The book tells the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated power over half a century—and how in doing so, it helped transform capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many Americans today.
Pre-order the book here:
-RW
"Charles Koch is a cronytarian who funds beltarians but this book will no doubt paint him as a libertarian"
ReplyDeleteThat's surprisingly easy to do when you all have similar, horrible ideas like open borders.
Open borders? We want 7 billion borders.
DeleteI would venture to state, without serious fear of contradiction, that Charles Koch has done more to promote and preserve the ideas of classical liberalism than anyone currently living. If not CK, who?
ReplyDeleteThat’s easy. Ron Paul.
DeleteThe literature that awakened Paul in the 60s and 70s was all published and in many cases commissioned by institutions chiefly supported by Koch. There would be no modern libertarian consciousness in the absence of Koch's vision and commitment.
DeleteI would curious how well the classic liberalism of the Kochs has survivied that 50 years. I would be willing to be Not at all!
DeleteFor all the crony beltarian influence what have the two Koch brothers achieved compared to their peers in the billionaires managing society through government game? Sure, the leftists attribute a lot to them, but even including all that it doesn't seem like all that much in comparison.
ReplyDeleteYeah. The Kochs are to the left the same sort of devil figure as Ayn Rand. They take small, usually out of context, stuff, then massage and twist it into gigantic edifices of influence, conspiracy, and evil-doing.
Delete