While Cato advocated a wide-ranging libertarian policy agenda in the late 1970s, another Koch-supported think tank, the Reason Foundation, concentrated on making the case for selling off public property and outsourcing public services to private corporations. The effort built on the popularity of a countercultural libertarian magazine called Reason that was started in 1968 by an Ayn Rand devotee in a dorm room with a ditto machine.60 It was then taken over by Robert W. Poole Jr., an MIT-trained engineer of a cohort after Koch’s who learned of libertarianism in high school. In college, he
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