Free Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

claims of Nazi genocide in World War II as “invented.” “It was a stew pot of ideas,” recalled diZerega, who later became a liberal academic, “but if you grew up with more money than God, and felt weird about it, this version of history, where the robber barons were heroes, would certainly make you feel a lot better about it.”
    At the Freedom School, Charles became particularly enamored of the work of two laissez-faire economists, the Austrian theorist Ludwig von Mises and his star pupil, Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian exile, who visited the Freedom School. Hayek’s book
The Road to Serfdom
had become an improbable best seller in 1944, after
Reader’s Digest
published a condensed version. It offered a withering critique of “collectivism” and argued that centralized government planning, in which liberals were then engaged, would lead, inexorably, to dictatorship. In many respects, Hayek was a throwback, romanticizing a lost golden age of idealized unfettered capitalism that arguably never existed for much of the population. But Hayek’s views were more nuanced than many American adherents understood.As Angus Burgin describes in
The Great Persuasion
, many reactionary Americans knew only the distorted translation of Hayek’s work that had appeared in
Reader’s Digest
. The conservative publication omitted Hayek’s politically inconvenient support for a minimum standard of living for the poor, environmental and workplace safety regulations, and price controls to prevent monopolies from taking undue profits.
    Hayek’s ideas arrived in America during the post-Depression years, when conservative businessmen were scrambling to salvage the credibility of the laissez-faire ideology that had been popular before the 1929 market crash. Since then, Keynesian economics had taken its place. Hayek’s genius was to recast the discredited ideology in an appealing new way. As Kim Phillips-Fein writes in her book
Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan
, rather than describing the free market as just an economic model,Hayek touted it as the key to all human freedom. He vilified government as coercive, and glorified capitalists as standard-bearers for liberty. Naturally, his ideas appealed to American businessmen like Charles Koch and the other backers of the Freedom School, whose self-interest Hayek now cast as beneficial to all of society.
    Charles’s funding of the Freedom School was his first step toward what would become a lifelong, tax-deductible sponsorship of libertarianism in America. His hope was to use his wealth to inject his fringe views into the mainstream by turning the Freedom School into an accredited graduate school and then a four-year undergraduate program specializing in libertarian philosophy, to be called Rampart College. A 1966 brochure features a photograph of LeFevre with Charles, shovel in hand, breaking ground for the new institution. Martin was hired to head Rampart’s history department. But, as Ames recounts, the venture soon fell victim to mismanagement, leaving a trail of disgruntled backers. Eventually, the school moved to the South, where for a number of years it was sustained by the anti-union textile tycoon Roger Milliken.By the time LeFevre died in 1986, the Kochs had largely distanced themselves from him, perhaps sensing that he was a political liability. But Charles wrote a warm letter to LeFevre in 1973. He also gave a speech in the 1990s crediting the Freedom School with profoundly influencing him. It was, he said, “where I began developing a passionate commitment to liberty as the form of social organization most in harmony with reality and man’s nature, because it’s where I was first exposed in-depth to thinkers such as Mises and Hayek.” He added, “In short, market principles have changed my life and guide everything I do.”
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    A s Charles grew increasingly ideologically driven, his brothers David and Bill, as he had,