Another excerpt from the Wichita Eagle Blog today, titled Pompeo takes on Kochs' critics:

Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Wichita, authored a Politico commentary calling on the Obama administration and congressional Democrats to stop harassing the Kochs. It was his comeback to the unsuccessful efforts of Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Bobby Rush, D-Ill., to demand that "a representative of Koch Industires" testify at a hearing on the Keystone XL pipeline, a project Koch has said it has no stake in. "Charles Koch and David Koch, co-owners of Koch Industries, are U.S. citizens, taxpayers, entrepreneurs and employers. Their businesses employ nearly 50,000 people in the U.S. alone," Pompeo wrote, noting its 2,600 Kansas employees. "The company has never been bailed out by the U.S. taxpayers. Given that many Americans are now desperate for jobs, we should be begging entrepreneurs to look for new opportunities -- not attacking them because their companies might make a profit."

There's been a groundswell of "pity the billionaire" articles about the Kochs recently, which like all of their groundswells suggests central planning. And who better than Pompeo to praise them, especially since he was their guy in the 2008 Republican primary. Coincidentally, I have another quote from Thomas Frank's book, Pity the Billionaire (pp. 76-77):

As the Tea Party grew, becoming the official populist response to the economic disaster, opportunities both political and economic saw the gathering crowds and the spreading outrage as their very own ship, sailing benevolently into port. Indeed, the categories of "politics" and "profit" became so thoroughly scrambled on the resurgent Right that by September of 2010 it was possible for Mike Pompeo, a Republican candidate for Congress in Wichita, Kansas, to describe the political movement itself as "a restoration of the great American entrepreneurial spirit." There were so many entrepreneurs, and they swung into action so quickly in the wake of the protests, that you sometimes wondered if their affluence wasn't the object of the agitation all along.

I actually have a lot of respect for entrepeneurs who founded companies that build things, although I can also think of plenty of examples of such who went on to use their wealth and power for ill purposes -- Henry Ford's notorious antisemitism is a classic example -- and they tend to be the rule rather than the exception, probably because there's something fundamentally rotten about living off a profit margin. But whereas Ford built his company from scratch, the Kochs inherited theirs, and while I do have respect for Charles Koch as a smart and principled businessman -- David is another story altogether -- he grew his company mostly through shrewd acquisitions and stern management, not to mention tax breaks and political payola. (The Bush Administration, for instance, settled hundreds of EPA charges against Koch for pennies on the dollar, with no concession of wrongdoing. In some ways, a "get out of jail card" is even better than a bailout.) To say that Koch created 50,000 jobs is nonsense.

Still, the Kochs aren't being attacked for their business work -- although they are in a notoriously dirty business, and they have an utterly scandalous environmental track record, and the oil industry has long been the poster boy for government corruption (although finance and pharmaceuticals have more than caught up). The problem with the Kochs is that they pump so much money into subverting our democracy. The more we have become aware of their activities, the more conscious we become of where that money comes from and what kind of world they want to create.