Bill Koch of anti-climate Koch Brothers fame - the ones who can't be dragged into the light of day since they work to blot out the sun - is now building his own private Wild West 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.

Matt Yglesias writes about the significance of this extremely wasteful fantasy in Slate:

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.

Altogether now: America @#$% Yeah! But at least this could divert some of his attention from spreading misinformation on climate change and other evildoings. I'm more concerned it might suffer the same fate as Westworld, or even worse, Itchy and Scratchy Land. Then again, it's private so we'll never know.

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