Old School
There was a time, Garrison Keillor laments, when conservatives were “pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships.” We’ve come a long way from Teddy Roosevelt’s square deal to government as corporate benefactor. Despite the self-proclaimed piety and faux-populist rhetoric of its adherents (”damn those godless liberal elites!”), modern conservatism boils down to the politics of pillage. Greed is back with a vengeance.
Given the prevailing ethos, this is utterly stupefying:
Warren Buffett Pledges around $30 Billion to Gates Foundation
Warren Buffett, the world’s second richest person, has donated nearly 85 percent of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help fight disease and poverty and improve education.
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WARREN BUFFETT: I don’t believe in creating dynastic wealth. My children have all received money from me and my wife. They’ll receive more on my death. But they are in the privileged top 1 percent at least of the population, perhaps the top .1 percent, even.
But I don’t really believe that in a society that aspires to be meritocratic and that believes in equality of opportunity — my kids have had advantage over 99 percent of the kids in the country…”
Yesterday’s spectacle must really have present-day conservatives scratching their heads. Most believed that talk radio and cable news pundits long ago successfully banished this sort of inerudite thinking to the kiddie table with the liberals:
I love it when I’m around the country club, and I hear people talking about the debilitating effects of a welfare society, he said. At the same time, they leave their kids a lifetime and beyond of food stamps. Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust officer. And instead of food stamps, they have stocks and bonds.
What planet is this guy from? As Congressional Republicans debate legislation to dramatically weaken or abolish the estate tax, a move which would benefit only a few of America’s wealthiest families at the expense of 98% of its taxpayers, Buffett waxed about meritocracy as he signed away his fortune — a fortune, it should be noted, that he amassed despite a tax code which conservative money-purifying enterprises like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform hold up as the poster boy for big government subversion of American prosperity.
It comes as no surprise that Mr. Buffett is no fan of current attempts to repeal the estate tax:
Mr. Buffett, the Omaha investor who ranks fourth on the Forbes magazine list of the richest Americans, said in an interview that he had not signed the petition itself because he thought it did not go far enough in defending the critical role that he said the estate tax played in promoting economic growth, by helping create a society in which success is based on merit rather than inheritance.
Mr. Buffett said repealing the estate tax would be a terrible mistake, the equivalent of choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the eldest sons of the gold-medal winners in the 2000 Olympics.
We would regard that as absolute folly in terms of athletic competition, he said.
We have come closer to a true meritocracy than anywhere else around the world, he said. You have mobility so people with talents can be put to the best use. Without the estate tax, you in effect will have an aristocracy of wealth, which means you pass down the ability to command the resources of the nation based on heredity rather than merit.
As Think Progress points out, Buffett not only opposes efforts to repeal the estate tax, he also criticized the Bush dividend and income tax cuts. He’s even *gasp* contributed tens of thousands to Democratic campaigns.
It’s easy to internalize a political philosophy constructed to rationalize the acquisition of personal wealth at the expense of everything and everyone else. Buffett’s brand requires principle and strength of character. Why not just create the Warren Edward Buffett Foundation in order to perpetuate his name and control over the funds?
…[H]e has small hopes that, by his doing this and kind of setting the model, that it could be that other philanthropists, other wealthy people who have some thought of being philanthropists, would decide instead to look around at the existing models, the existing foundations, and maybe giving to them rather than staffing up, building up a foundation with all the staff that that takes.
That’s old school, baby.
While I’m thinking about it, I should snap up that BuffettLies.com domain. Someone’s gonna be willing pay big money for that if Buffett keeps spouting off like this.
One Response to “Old School”
Oh hell yeah.
GREAT post.
Comment by ben on June 27, 2006 at 3:09 pm.