Well, more precisely, they are invested in convincing you that your well-being is tied to unrestricted free enterprise.

The Charles Koch Institute just launched its “Well-Being Initiative” purportedly to “advance our understanding of the meaning, foundations, and drivers of human flourishing.” But there is little doubt about the real motives for the new endeavor.

The board of advisers is stacked with libertarians, including Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute, who has written extensively on this topic. According to Slate, some of that work was previously featured on the Charles Koch Institute’s website. Brooks has written on the link between free enterprise and well-being, and in doing so, argued broadly for shrinking government, stressing that many programs that aid working class families do not necessarily increase happiness.

As the Slate piece points out, this sentiment is right in line with a memo from the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity that Politico obtained, in which they bemoaned that:

“[W]e consistently see that Americans in general are concerned that free-market policy—and its advocates—benefit the rich and powerful more than the most vulnerable of society,” the memo read. “We must correct this misconception.”

Keep in mind the Kochs want to abolish the minimum wage, slash medicare and dismantle social security. Those ideas aren’t popular. So now the Kochs hope to tell us that fair wages and retirement security won’t make people happy anyways.

The Kochs can pretend that this new “Well-Being Initiative” is some rosy philosophical pursuit to understand happiness for the greater good. It’s not. It’s just a new apparatus to forward their self-serving agenda and undermine government, cloaked as an apolitical side-project.