Learning about billionaire libertarians and their mind boggling perspective of injustice

The Koch Family. Phew. I'm already tired, fam.

The book I am reading right now - Dark Money - is not flattering to the family, particularly the two that at the helm of Koch Industries: Charles and the now deceased David. This book is a dizzying portrait of how some very wealthy people classify government regulations as injustice.

Um. Are you kitten me right meow?

Let's pause. The perspective of the ultra wealthy is surreal and distorted, albeit fascinating, in ways I completely overlooked or underestimated. My mind is blown by the idea that a billionaire has any clue what injustice is, but here we are.

Today, I learned what Charles Koch thinks is not just. This person, just like his father before him, hates government and the regulations the government imposes on companies and business. All of it. He hates taxes. He hates environmental regulations. He hates the idea of being transparent in his business dealings.

Koch Industries has been burned by quite a few lawsuits and settlements. In one case, a guy worked with benzene all the time and the company tested his blood annually. The company was supposed to share the results with employees if there were alarming levels, but Koch Industries didn't tell this guy for like two years. The worker got sick with leukemia, kept going to work, but when he got too weak to work, he was friggin' let go with six months pay (basically his sick bank). The widow thought the company would take care of them. Not even close. Thankfully she fought. The day before they were to go to court, the company settled.

In another case, the company didn't update an aging gas line which resulted in a couple people trying to start their truck and EXPLODING INTO A HUGE FIREBALL. The father of the driver won a $296 million dollar settlement. Instead of addressing the bad pipelines, Koch Industries just sold it. In another case, a whistle blower went to report Koch industries when they reported a completely falsified report on how much pollution was being created by a facility.

Okay, so this guy Charles Koch, the main dude at Koch Industries, is listed ninth on the Bloomberg Billionaires list. His company has annual revenue of $110 BILLION dollars. And this is the person who feels that the government making his company report alarming blood results to coworkers is not just. He doesn't think he should have to worry about bad gas lines his company is profiting off of. This guy's company ripped off Native Americans by purposefully mis-measuring oil taken from indigenous lands. This guy thinks having his pollution-spewing, employee-killing, ethically questionable company regulated is injustice.

This would be laughable if it wasn't straight up terrifying.

The Freedom School: "We're not anarchists, we're autarchists" - yeah okay pal

This book I'm reading, Dark Money, is pretty disturbing. I'm not even halfway through and I can't tell if I'm supposed to laugh or cry. Do I continue to believe in humanity, or make a hermit plan and escape society? I'm gonna' stick around, but, dang humanity. Do better.

This book starts off with some history on the Koch family and about libertarian movement. I always fancied libertarians as harmless. Just some sweet little anarchists that want to smoke pot and get a prostitute legally. Nah, I was wrong. They aren't harmless. The ones in charge are dangerous and they are very, very smart.

And of course some are crazy af. Like this Santa Claus-looking dude Robert LeFevre that created a fringe group called the Freedom School in 1957. LeFevre hated Communism. Simultaneously, he favored abolition of the United States government. He also thought he had supernatural powers, floundered into bankruptcy, and was obsessed with a 14 year old girl. 

Listen to the crap this Freedom School belched out into the world of ideas (real shit ideas, I might add):

• Taught a revisionist history that painted robber barons as heroes and the Gilded Age as the U.S.'s golden era.
• Taxes were theft.
• The weak and poor should be taken care of by the wealthy, not by government.
• The South should have been allowed to secede and people "should be allowed to sell themselves into slavery if they wished." (No, I'm not making this up.)

It's no surprise a group of teachers that went to the Freedom School for a session immediately called the FBI after they returned. The teachers said the school was proposing the Bill of Rights be reduced to "just a single one: the right to own property" and calling for no police, no fire, no help for the poor, etc.

While, this LeFevre freak clearly should not have been an inspiration to any-damn-body, the book says that the Freedom School was "seminal to Charles Koch's political evolution."

Welp...