It’ll probably look like this, but the donkeys will run on crude oil. (Photo by Caveman Chuck Coker.)
Bill Koch, of the let’s-destroy-the-world-for-profit-and-whatthehell-let’s-take-out-democracy-while-we’re-at-it-lol Kochs, is building a town in Colorado.
It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town’s founder can look down on his creation. …
This town is billionaire Bill Koch’s fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County. It’s an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse.
Don’t get too excited, loser! You’re not invited.
Koch’s project manager has told county officials that the enclave in the middle of the 6,400-acre Bear Ranch won’t ever be open to the public. It is simply for Koch’s amusement and for that of his family and friends — and historians. It is the ultimate repository for his huge collection of Western memorabilia.
The last time we heard from super-smart-collector Bill Koch, it was about how he got ripped off buying fake wine. So there’s a pretty good chance that when those hallowed historians show up to tour Billy Koch’s Kountry Kavalcade, they’ll be presented with photos of Cowboy Curtis signed, “Annie Oakleys.”
Slate’s Matt Yglesias (from whom we heard about this story) notes the significance of this extremely wasteful idea:
This sort of thing is why progressive taxation is important. As people get richer and richer, it gets harder and harder to think of cost-effective ways of spending the marginal dollar on amusing yourself. When you take from the rich and give to the poor, you end up generating a lot of extra welfare as people who don’t have very much can have their lives greatly improved at relatively low cost. Billionaires need to either plot schemes for world domination or else build replica towns at vast expense.
Yglesias will never get to see this town, not being a historian or a Koch or a guy who wants to sell Bill Koch an AK-47 that he claims was owned by Wild Bill Hickok. Ergo, he is just jealous.
If a guy wants to make billions of dollars digging up oil and selling it to people and lobbying so that we use more oil and gas and spend millions to shift political opinion and go out of his way to preserve a long-standing, highly detrimental way of life solely so that he can live a lifestyle that is so far beyond what a moral person would find acceptable that it basically makes the Curiosity rover’s trip to Mars look like you headed to your bathroom, that’s his right. This is America.
In the meantime, we’ve gone ahead and made this visitor’s badge, which we think is of high-enough quality to fool even the eagle eyes at Kochtown, USA. Have fun, and send us lots of pictures.
