Welfare Kings
by digby
I love history don’t you? Here’s a stirring story of an American entrepreneur of yore:
In the second half of the 19th century, America was in the grip of a massive railroad boom. Boosted by eager investors, lucrative subsidies and free land, railroads sprung up connecting every corner of the United States without much thought for demand or necessity…
Dutch investors were heavily involved in several railroad lines in the North Texas area, including the Fort Worth and Denver Railway Company, which had spawned Quanah in 1887 and owned just about all the land in town. County records show Harry provided advertising services and worked directly for the Fort Worth and Denver for nearly 20 years, sometimes receiving payment in the form of land transferred directly from the legendary railroad builder Grenville M. Dodge, who helped lay the Union Pacific and more than a dozen other lines across the country.
Fascinating. Jonathan at ATR writes:
So, first the government kills the Indians. (In fact, before Grenville Dodge was a railroad magnate he was a general in the U.S. Army, and Wikipedia tells me that he ordered the punitive Powder River Expedition against the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho in 1865.)
Then the government hands over the land for free to the railroads, along with giant subsidies of other kinds.
Then the railroad owned by one of the guys who killed the Indians hands over some of the free land he got from the government to Harry …
Who’s Harry? Why it’s Harry Koch, the grandfather of libertarian moneybags, David and Charles Koch. You remember them. The one’s who insist that “government handouts” are unAmerican?
“No political system can possibly guarantee either a national economic security or an individual standard of living. Government can guarantee no man a job or a livelihood,” Harry Koch wrote on February 1, 1935, nine months before Charles Koch was born.
But there’s nothing wrong with the government stealing land and doling the proceeds out to its rich friends, right? Isn’t that what it’s all about?
Read the whole article about old Harry. It’s fascinating. Turns out that propaganda and manipulation is a genetic trait.
Update: Has anyone ever asked Judge Originalist about all these “takings”? He seems to have a real problem with it now, but this country has a long history of stealing huge swathes of land from indigenous people. How does he square that?
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