Skeptic Project

I suspect these guys have kept Austrian economics and other fringe libertarian ideas on life support with the frakking hundreds of millions of dollars they've spent in right-wing astroturfing:

Covert Operations
The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama.
by Jane Mayer

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer?printable=true

Anyone who wants to invest that kind of cash in forcing a political outcome more to his liking clearly doesn't believe in the spontaneous, organic development of society advocated by Austrians like Hayek.

From the article:

Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

It makes you wonder how much of the right's culture of urban legends, economic doomsdays and conspiracy theories depends on subsidies from people like the Koch brothers.

Heard about these guys on NPR. The big thing is their funding of the Tea Party. Without them it would probably be a much smaller movement. Despicable, these guys.