Koch — Believe in People
Charles Koch & Brian Hooks, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World (St. Martin’s Press, 2020)
Critical counterpoint — this note documents where Koch’s argument overlaps with and diverges from the project’s framework.
The Argument
Koch argues that America’s biggest problems — poverty, failing education, broken communities — result from top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions imposed by government and institutions. The alternative: empower people closest to the problem to solve it themselves, from the bottom up. Trust individuals, reduce institutional barriers, support “social entrepreneurs” who find local solutions.
Koch repudiates his own earlier hyper-partisanship and calls for cross-partisan cooperation focused on issues rather than parties. The book features stories of grassroots organizations addressing poverty, addiction, criminal justice, and education through empowerment rather than management.
Where It Overlaps
The surface-level alignment is real:
- Bottom-up vs. top-down. The CLT is bottom-up. Cooperative governance is self-governance. The project trusts residents to govern their own community rather than being managed by professionals. Koch would nod at this.
- People as agents, not cases. The vault’s entire autonomy thesis (Self-Determination Theory) aligns with Koch’s claim that treating people as problems to be managed is dehumanizing. The project refuses means-testing, professional management, and compliance-driven affordability for exactly this reason.
- Proximity principle. People closest to a problem understand it best. The cooperative governs itself because residents know their community better than any external manager could. This is Ostrom’s core insight, and Koch cites it (via Hayek’s “local knowledge” argument).
Where It Diverges
The divergences are structural, not superficial:
Koch’s “bottom-up” is market individualism. His “empowerment” means removing barriers to individual entrepreneurship — deregulation, reduced zoning, fewer licensing requirements. The vault’s empowerment is relational — people are empowered when embedded in community with belonging, mutual aid, and shared governance. Koch produces homo oeconomicus (Brown — Undoing the Demos). The vault builds homo politicus.
Koch’s framework would gut the CLT’s enabling conditions. CLTs depend on specific legal structures (ground leases, tax-exempt status), municipal partnerships (land donation, zoning flexibility), and public financing (CDFI loans, tax credits). The Koch network’s policy agenda has historically worked to dismantle institutional supports of this kind. The “bottom-up” rhetoric masks an opposition to the very public infrastructure that makes community-owned alternatives possible.
Koch has no theory of belonging. This is The Flatland Problem in action. Koch operates on the Hayek-Marcuse plane — his x-axis is “market vs. state,” and his answer is “more market.” He has no z-axis. Nowhere in the book does he address the question: what do people need from each other? His social entrepreneurs are individuals solving problems. The vault’s framework says: the deepest problems — loneliness, disconnection, the absence of community — cannot be solved by individuals, no matter how empowered. They require commons.
“Believe in people” vs. “believe in community.” Koch believes in people as individuals with gifts to offer. The vault believes in people as social creatures who flourish through belonging. These sound similar. They produce radically different structures. Koch’s version produces a society of empowered individuals competing and cooperating through markets. The vault’s version produces communities of embedded persons governing shared resources together.
The philanthropy question. Koch positions Stand Together (his philanthropic network) as a model for bottom-up social change. But philanthropic empowerment is still top-down — someone with resources deciding who to empower and how. The CLT removes this dynamic: the community owns itself. It doesn’t need a benefactor. This is the difference between Koch’s “empowerment” (given by those with power) and Ostrom’s “self-governance” (exercised by those who govern themselves).
The Co-optation Risk
Koch’s language — “bottom-up,” “believe in people,” “empower,” “social entrepreneurs” — is dangerously close to the vault’s language. This creates a co-optation risk: the project could be misread as a Koch-compatible, market-friendly, libertarian initiative. The manifesto needs to be clear about the distinction:
- Bottom-up ≠ anti-government. The project uses legal structures created by the state (CLT, tax exemption, zoning) while ensuring that governance is democratic and community-controlled.
- Empowerment ≠ individualism. The project empowers people through community, not instead of community.
- Believe in people ≠ believe in markets. Believing in people means believing they can govern shared resources, maintain commons, and build village-scale community — not that they can compete their way to flourishing.
Usefulness
Despite the structural critique, the book is useful as a translation guide. Koch’s audience — business leaders, philanthropists, libertarian-leaning moderates — is an audience the project may need to reach. Understanding how Koch frames “bottom-up” helps the manifesto speak to that audience while maintaining the structural distinction. The project is not Koch-compatible. But it can borrow his rhetoric and redirect it toward commons governance rather than market individualism.