Charles Koch’s Disturbing High School Economics Project Teaches ‘Sacrificing Lives for Profits’

Lee is also a fellow at the Independent Institute, formerly funded in part by the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation, and an “expert” at the Heartland Institute, which has received funding from the Charles Koch Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, another Koch-led foundation that’s now closed. The professor previously held faculty positions at several other schools including George Mason University, also known as “Koch U,” which has raked in by far the most money from the Charles Koch Foundation, the majority going to its two free-market academic centers, the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, at nearly $78 million since 2005.

Students at FSU found “Sacrificing Lives for Profits” and attended the February 4 Common Sense Economics kickoff event, distributing flyers about the Stavros Center’s Koch funding and alerting participants to the author’s enthusiasm for sacrificing lives for profit. They later demonstrated outside the building during the reception.

Ralph Wilson, a doctoral candidate at FSU who has led efforts to expose the university’s Koch ties, took part in the demonstration. He wrote in an email to me:

Rather than teaching economics, FSU’s agreement has let the Koch network propagate pro-corporate propaganda into K-16 classrooms all over the country, providing intellectual justifications for a moral trade-off: lives for profit … The curriculum is a mish-mash of recycled free-market essays from Koch-funded think tanks patched together by corporate academics.

Despite documents that clearly outline how the Charles Koch Foundation’s grant established the Program for Excellence in Economic Education, professors and university officials have gone to great lengths to deny this connection. According to Wilson, FSU officials denied that the workshop had ties to Koch money, and a local news story set to run was never published.

One professor in the Excellence in Economic Education program, Joab Corey, who spoke at the Feb. 5 workshop, sent emails to multiple FSU students who had asked about his Koch connections at the event. Corey wrote that he is “not biased or influenced by donors in any way” and denied any ties to Koch funding, writing that he “did not really know where the funding for my position came from,” although he “vaguely remembered” that his position was funded by BB&T Bank (actually, the BB&T Charitable Foundation, which is known for making at least 63 million-dollar grants to universities explicitly for the purpose of teaching Ayn Rand’s libertarian bible Atlas Shrugged). Corey’s “undergraduate teaching specialist position” is in fact funded by the BB&T Foundation, which came on as a Donor Partner in the Koch-FSU agreement. What Corey failed to acknowledge is that the very program he teaches in was established with Koch funding, and that, at least originally, every hire within his program and the similar Political Economy and Free Enterprise program had to meet the approval of Charles Koch Foundation officials.

Corey also wrote that he thought those who objected to “Sacrificing Lives for Profit” didn’t understand the argument and he invited dissenters to discuss it at office hours.

In 2014, someone left a customer review of Economics: Private and Public Choice, coauthored by Gwartney, linking him and other authors to Koch funding. Joseph Calhoun, assistant director of the Stavros Center and a lecturer in the Excellence in Economic Education program, weirdly posted a response credited to Gwartney that reads, “the Stavros Center for Economic Education and Free Enterprise at Florida State University which I direct has never received any funds from the Koch brothers or Americans For Prosperity, nor any of their charitable organizations.” This is patently false.

Another coauthor of this volume and of Common Sense Economics is self-proclaimed “free-market environmentalist” Richard Stroup of Raleigh, North Carolina, who formerly taught at FSU and is a research fellow at the Independent Institute and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, which was founded by the Charles Koch Foundation. Unfortunately for Stroup’s “environmentalist” claims, and for the many students who’ve had to read Economics: Private and Public Choice, the textbook has earned a failing grade for its treatment of climate change by PhD economist Yoram Bauman.

Stroup’s wife is Jane Shaw, former president of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, which has long advocated reducing university funding, cutting courses that focus on non-Western subject matter, and giving university donors control of how schools use their money. The Pope Center is funded by the John W. Pope Foundation, which has given millions to higher education programs mainly in the South and is led by Republican political mega-donor and close Koch brothers ally Art Pope.

Common Sense Economics has other primary hubs at University of South Florida’s own Stavros Center and Northern Michigan University’s Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship, which Common Sense Economics coauthor Tawni Ferrarini codirects.

The Stavros Center and other similar centers are part of a national movement to push free-market principles on kids all the way down to kindergarten, headed by the national Council for Economic Education, which has more than 200 state and university affiliates, including FSU and many other universities that also receive funding from the Charles Koch Foundation. Many of these affiliates host Common Sense Economics courses and workshops.

More Koch-funded programs are part of this movement. Charles Koch’s Youth Entrepreneurs program to indoctrinate grade-school kids with free-market gospel is well established. Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies’ The EDvantage program, which features Ferrarini as one of its editors, is a “curriculum hub” for K-12 educators.

Across the country, Koch-funded academic centers and professors are training teachers of all grade levels to pass on the same ideas, even promoting lives lost in the name of profit. “Corporations like Koch Industries need this generation to make the lives for profit trade-off in order to justify their continued existence, and so they are trying to influence younger and younger students,” wrote Wilson. “Charles Koch is quoted in Jane Mayer’s recently published book, Dark Money, as saying that youths were crucial to his quest to alter society because ‘this is the only group that is open to a radically different social philosophy.’”