According to Jane Mayer, this makes him a corporate tool:
I was the main speaker of the night at a fancy dinner. The crowd included millionaire business owners and corporate executives. And the man who introduced me, and who had invited me to speak, was billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.
My topic was what it always is: the evils of corporate welfare and bailouts, and the destructive influence of the Big Business lobby in Washington. In my talk, I blasted “regulatory robber barons” and “subsidy sucklers.”
But if you follow the Left’s talking points, my talk was part of Koch’s “pro-corporate movement.”
I report this both as fair disclosure and to make a point: The Koch-created Institute for Humane Studies has, over the past two years, paid me on a few occasions to speak to various audiences (and also to mentor interns). The Koch-funded Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute have also hosted book talks for me.
My message in these Koch-sponsored speeches was the same: Big Business is using big government to steal from taxpayers, consumers and small-businessmen.
That Charles Koch is one sly dog–inviting a journalist to denounce the government’s pro-corporate agenda of welfare, subsidies, and bailouts certainly is a clever way of promoting a pro-corporate agenda. Diabolical! The easy way would have been to invite a proponent of subsidies and corporate welfare–say, for example, bailouts for major banks and car makers or “green” subsidies for massive corporations? But to vehemently denounce corporatism as a vehicle for secretly promoting it? Genius.
Thank goodness we have the intrepid Jane Mayer to “connect the dots.” Or maybe, just maybe–as Carney suggests–Mayer simply has not the slightest inkling of what libertarians believe or why we believe it.