David Koch’s ‘dark money’ was misunderstood
Here’s a shocker: people are more complicated than the caricatures disseminated by their enemies suggest. Witness the stupefyingly rich David Koch, who together with his brother Charles, presided over a business empire worth some $115 billion. David, who died on Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was at one with his brother in embracing a staunch libertarian philosophy of government and also in his belief in the power of philanthropic investment. When you control a personal fortune of $50 billion, you are in a position to distribute philos to many anthropoi. This the Koch brothers did, on a breathtaking scale. A lot of their money, and a lot of money they leveraged from other conservative donors, was siphoned to political candidates of whom they approved.
