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Singing About the Wrong Rich Guys
A lot of the problem really is about rich guys, but not those 90 miles north of Richmond. DC only does what it is paid to do, and only a few get very rich at it. None get super-rich. They don’t drive the culture or the values that shape policy. People who write the big campaign checks, fund the influential non-profits, and offer lucrative post-government service careers do.
Perhaps we just need to be more sensitive to the search for meaning and belonging by the super-rich. As silly as that sounds, give me a moment to explain.
Across the street from my old office in DC is a sizeable office building with a large, high-ceilinged lobby. The lobby used to be filled with utterly ridiculous sculptures whose only apparent common feature was that each had to be large and garish. The display changed every few weeks but the level of quality remained the same. I found it baffling.
An acquaintance who knows something of local commerce and the commercial real estate biz explained that it was a common phenomenon that capable businessmen from working-class or small business family backgrounds could achieve great wealth but feel they were not really accepted in high society (or perhaps more likely, their wives would crave such acceptance). And the most direct entre is to buy one’s way into the world of art. Like sharks on an injured whale, purveyors of alleged objects d’art, decorators, stylists, and foundation fundraisers circle and feed on that craving.
Rich guys buying really bad art is not a major social problem. Rich guys buying really bad policy and funding ideological grifters is perhaps the biggest current threat to the American economic, cultural, and social order. Rich people are made to think they are joining a moral and social elite by funding bad people and grossly distorted policies. The major problem threatening the well-being of people everywhere on earth is the rapid emergence of a large, successful grifter class that has concocted a monopoly on psychic rewards for very rich donors and for fellow travelers in media, entertainment, and academia.
Donors are told they are Creating the Future, Ending Racism. Saving Our Democracy, or Saving the Planet, or at a minimum, separating themselves from the unenlightened troglodyte lower orders. The super-rich now fund the biggest grifters in the world in exchange for attendance at exclusive events with their fellow marks and the delusive satisfaction of being praised by con men and the political class they empower.
It is beyond ironic that people who got rich by being innovative, bold, creative, and competent lavishly fund people who are expressly none of those things. At every Davos gathering, a collection of successful people whose innovative actions, skills, and productivity helped to shape a modern world in which standards of living are rising as never before are actually paying visionless hacks to talk about taking away cars, cows and children precisely because those hacks cannot imagine a world in which people innovate, adapt, create, or adjust rather than just passively endure (largely imaginary) future catastrophes.
When an “expert” tells you that the future is eating bugs and a permanent global shortage of reliable energy, isn’t it time to find an expert who knows how to chart a better path?
You would think that solving tangible problems in new ways would appeal to the most successful people on the planet. The grifter class does not go after those kinds of issues:
- Why not a project of placing small-form nuclear reactors in remote places in developing nations? That would be a vastly better option than acres of windmills and solar panels.
- Why can’t big money and the best minds devise an aggressive program to rescue the 5,000 kids per year who “graduate” high school in Baltimore without being able to read or do very basic math?
- Where is the model public-private program to literally round up and triage the homeless and properly treat specific pathologies?
- How do we make our entire workforce more productive and flexibly employable in a rapidly changing economy?
- How should we encourage rather than castigate growth?
- Instead of telling young people that they will soon die on a burning planet (and deserve it if white and/or male) why not tell them that technology and the removal of cognitive and ideological barriers could make them 50 times more wealthy than their great-grandparents if they embrace opportunity and deploy that technology in a free society and make a better, cleaner, safer world for all?
- How do we end the pernicious campaign to make African Americans surrender academic excellence and actual ownership of skills and knowledge in exchange for an artificial victimhood and perpetual dependence on the goodwill (and political dominance) of white liberals?
- [Add about a thousand other constructive items here.]
In short, there are so many ways to better spend money than to give it to über-grifters like Klaus Schwab, BLM, 350.org, or John Kerry. Why isn’t that happening?
Perhaps the mission for normals is not to try to convert the super-rich to conservativism or libertarian values but instead just make them realize how foolish they look funding the pernicious garbage and loser politicians they do. Excellence, optimism, public service, and innovation are very American values. Why aren’t the rich promoting the values, conditions, and habits that made it possible for them to become successful instead of paying losers to try to shut it all down? How do we provide the necessary psychological reinforcement for sane, productive leadership? How do we give hugs, praise, and reassurance to those who clearly need it and in so doing save our country and the planet?
Published in General
I stopped reading right there. I don’t need the explanation. I understand it, and that is brilliant. Incisive diagnosis of one of the big causes of societal dysfunction. Thank you.
I love your list here, too. Wish I could give more than one like.
Very insightful, OB. It makes so much sense. I’m fascinated by the fact that those who prosper through hard work and grit seem to lose that understanding over time, as they try to fit into a group that really doesn’t want them or care about them. How can they abandon those very virtues and attributes that benefited them, in order to satisfy a group that doesn’t respect them, and won’t even respect them when they join them? It baffles the mind.
I think, as the OP so vividly points out, it’s a characteristic of the super-rich, as those who prosper in their lives through hard work and grit and who need to continue demonstrating both for what is substantially most of their lives generally continue to understand their blessings and their responsibilities–and keep their sphere of influence in both relatively local–until the end of those lives. Most of them at least contentedly so.
Perhaps the Bill Gateses of the world just get bored after the first few hundred million. Continuing to work hard doesn’t really enrich their families’ lives, because they’ve already hit peak privilege, so perhaps they just start looking around for other opportunities to meddle on a global scale. Sadly, they don’t have to look far.
What does remains baffling to me are the cap-in-hand pilgrimages made to Davos (etc) by the elected political classes who return home from each encounter and start writing the espoused lunacy from any particular year into law, even though it’s nothing remotely related to any platform on which they ran for office. (This situation is worsening in the US, but it has reached crisis proportions in the UK, where every political party save the tiny Reform Party has signed on to “net zero,” and any sort of climate-change hysterical agenda they can possibly imagine. It really makes no never-mind who the public votes for locally, because the Tories, Labour, and the LibDems are all on board at the national level. Although the majority of the population is not.)
Most recently in the UK, one of the “quangos” (Quasi-Non-Governmental-Organizations, funded by the government, but not part of the civil service, and with considerable clout) has urged the populace not to heat their homes in the evenings and at night in order to help the government hit its net-zero target. Instead, they’re being told to use heat during the day when electricity usage is lower. (And when–of course–anyone who works outside the home isn’t in it.)
I’m so old I remember when the big thing in the UK was “night storage heaters,” electric radiator thingys which charged up an array of ceramic bricks with heat at night when electricity usage was lower, and then gradually released it during the day.
Apparently the anticipated stress on the power grid (the shortfall of which is already massive) for overnight charging of electric cars has upended this equation. So dig out your hot water bottle, and get knitting Granny, because it’s going to be a long, cold winter!
Tell that to the prayer groups raided by FBI SWAT teams. Tell that to anyone affected by Covid or the reaction to it or pays taxes to support the ten trillion dollar scam.
Tax revenues from the masses are just a baseline entitlement. Campaign funding, side income, jobs in the firms you regulate, valuable publicity buy outcomes.
I think that the fundamental issue is that the super-rich are Liberals. This is the dominant religion in our country, taught in the schools. They are going to fund causes that are consistent with their religion.
You present a few policy ideas, but nothing about restoring traditional religion, family, and moral values. I don’t think that it’s going to appeal to much of anybody.
The problem with the Libertarian version of Liberalism, which inhabits the political Right and the Republican party in our country, is that it has no moral values to speak of. It’s all about selfishness. Unsurprisingly, those who are selfish don’t tend to support moral causes. They think that they do, because they actually believe that leaving everyone free to do whatever in the world they want is the essence of virtue.
The Progressive version of Liberalism, at least, is not entirely selfish. It’s usually misguided, in my view, but it’s not exclusively selfish.
Freedom isn’t about selfishness. It is about giving people the choice to be charitable or greedy. You can’t force someone to be good. They have to choose it. We should tell everyone that selfishness is bad by we should not use force.
To be fair, Bill Gates was doing fine and minding his own business until the Clinton Administration Justice Department pulled the old extortion racket on him.
OB wrote:
This would have substantial appeal to people who want to reclaim and restore urban neighborhoods. An organization that gets the feces off the streets and clears the zombie meth-lab RVs out of residential areas would reveal the shameful failure of the government to ensure public safety and civic decorum, and remind us that it’s not a matter of resources, it’s a matter of will.
OB also wrote:
This is more complex. Some Big Money guys have tried. I think Zuck gave away a metric buttload of money on education, and the results were grim. It’s not the money. It’s the culture. And you’re right, family and spirituality and morals matter.
The question is how those attributes are restored. You can use the state to force moral standards and punish people for non-compliance, but you end up with a place where the whole “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” notion gets tossed in favor of a restrictive code of behavior that does not suit this unruly nation. For values and attitudes and morals to change, they have to be assumed, willingly, understood and inhabited, not imposed. Forced conversions last until the Inquisitor is out of earshot.
Rich people can offer moral instruction and examples, I suppose, but it would seem that this is best left to churches, of which there are quite a few the last time I checked. I do see your point – but some people might be more inclined to listen to a wealthy influencer who pushed a trad message if they didn’t also feel obliged to believe in a theological model they don’t accept.
It comes down to whether one believes that the nation is better off if a diverse group of people find virtue by different paths, or whether a particular path is necessary and enshrined in law.
Odd, but I think this is upside down. Regarding individual liberty as the fundamental building block of the polity is not selfish. It constructs a bulwark against the state that resists coercion and control. It is not selfish for me to say that my property is mine, my thoughts are my own, my speech shall not to be trammeled, and so on. If so for me, on principle, then so for all, which is hardly selfish.
That’s the bottom line. From that you build a society of laws that constrains the anti-social, the predatory elements. The Golden Rule + utilitarian extrapolation + the minimal required amount of state power, and all that.
The “progressive version of Liberalsm” rejects all that in favor of supraorbital identity politics that trump law and tradition. It finds personal identification in politically-shaped narratives of grievance and oppression, and uses these broad and unchallenged fictions to elevate their own selves to the highest status the society provides, The Victim.
A hundred years ago you may have been right, because the progressives were concerned with meat-packing plant conditions and slums and disenfranchisement, and these were not selfish issues. But the epitome of the modern progressive is someone who reports you to HR for not using your neopronouns and micro-aggressively says “you guys” when you are OBVIOUSLY an Enby. Selfishness in its purest form.
Could you be more specific? According to Weakapedia:
(Emphasis added.) That is a very large possible range. Is it anywhere near a metric [Expletive]ton?
😜
Divide by a standard pantload to get to an imperial crapton, then use the pound/kilogram conversion factor.
But seriously, I’m amused by how the Malthusian left ignores the size of markets necessary to make their privileged lifestyle possible. If we consumed the proposed amount of meat, commercial agriculture would collapse, and the great cities would empty out to become subsistence farmers. Fortunately farming is as simple as M. Bloomberg thinks it is, or Reverend Malthus would be correct about human populations.
No kidding. More people! Make more people! We need them.