Career
Born in San Francisco, Kohlberg moved to New York and set up a business buying linen in Ireland that was then shipped to China, where local weavers turned the raw linen into fine textiles. The finished products were then sent to the United States where they were sold to consumers as luxury fabrics. Kohlberg"s business was highly profitable.
His business interests made him travel many times to China.
During one such trip in 1943, after inspecting the progress of the Chinese war effort, he became convinced him that the many stories in the American press of Chiang Kai-shek"s corruption were false and were being spread by communist sympathizers. He was the financial backer of Plain Talk, which merged with The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty,>published by the Foundation for Economic Education in 1950.
