Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right

by Jane Mayer

Critics argued that the extraordinarily rich had managed to shirk their fair share. But this was not how Charles Koch looked at it. He argued that “there is no ‘fair share’ ” of the tax burden. The notion that cutting taxes on the wealthy shifted the burden to others, he said, was a false premise. Everyone’s taxes should be cut, he argued. The aim, he said, was to shrink the government. “Our goal,” he wrote in an impassioned essay in 1978, is “not to reallocate the burden of government; our goal is to roll back government.” From the standpoint of a radically antigovernment libertarian, paying lower taxes wasn’t a matter of greed; it was a matter of principle. Libertarianism elevated tax avoidance into a principled crusade. Indeed, Koch argued that it was a moral act for the wealthy to cut their own taxes. As he put it in the same essay, “Morally, lowering taxes is simply defending property rights.” It was, as the Libertarian Party platform put it in 1980, the responsibility of citizens to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state.”