Sarah Jones in New York Magazine:
“It is likely not coincidental that the small government the Kochs desire would leave artists and scientists at the mercy of billionaires’ largesse. It’s as if he and his brother wanted to pitch us all on their vision for the world: If we let their companies gobble as much as they could, they would throw us a scrap or two. Never enough to live on; just enough to hold us until the next handout. They would allow us a glimpse of beauty, a mirage of progress, so that we would readily accept a cage.”
“Even David Koch’s Philanthropy Was Toxic,” John Nichols writes in The Nation, and quotes Theodore Roosevelt’s response to the Robber Barons’ Lord Bountiful act:
“’No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,’” Roosevelt curtly but accurately noted. In the case of the Koch family, there’s plenty of misconduct to investigate.”