Eat All the Rich? Or Just Some of Them
There are good billionaires and there are bad billionaires.
Some of the masses want the billionaires gone. Round them up, drop the guillotines. The left wants to tax them into the sea, having appointed itself sole definer of the word fair — as in, pay their fair share. The right is sore that billionaires keep funding the campaigns of the people doing the taxing.
A billion dollars tells you how big the pile is. It tells you nothing about how the pile got there. For a moral person, how is the important question.
Two roads to ten figures
There are two legal ways to get profoundly rich.
Road one. You build a better mousetrap. You make it well, you make it efficiently, you make it affordable, you make it morally, and you sell a mountain of them. Every dollar you collect is one somebody handed you willingly, because the thing you sold him was worth more than the cash in his pocket. You got rich by being useful three hundred million times in a row. Or you support the inventors by putting your own money — earned, and at risk — behind the people building the mousetrap. Same road. You fund the useful thing, and you bleed if it fails.
Road two. You get your golf partner in the Senate—or your old classmate at the EPA—to ban the other guy’s mousetrap, subsidize your worse one, and fine anyone who won’t buy it. You back the truck to the government trough, drop the snout, and feed — on the taxpayer, and on the fresh fiat the Fed prints to cover the tab. If you fail, others bleed, never you.
Both roads end in billions. One man earned his by making the world richer. The other is a crony who took his by force. One deserves admiration. The other deserves prosecution.
It isn’t the number. It’s the method.
What makes the crony billionaire worth hating was never the billions. It’s the method — someone else’s stuff pried loose with force. This has an older and shorter name: robbery. Everyone across the spectrum knows robbery when they see it — most detest it. Run it through a government, though, and it gets stamped legal. Legal it may be, but people still smell the crime.
And once you can see the method, you notice it doesn’t stop at billionaires.
The crony billionaire and the crony CEO have lobbyists to work the levers of force. Big pharma, corn ethanol, health insurance, hospital associations. They are parasites in the same way the able-bodied, able-minded multi-generational dole recipient is a parasite: each chose to live on what was taken from someone else.
The crony billionaire is the worst parasite — not because he’s richer, but because he works to write the laws, regulations and rules he feeds on. The small parasite just scoops the coins that bounce out of the bag while the big thief speeds off in the Lamborghini. Both are robbers. The guy on the dole may have no clue what he’s doing. He’s just surviving and lazy. The crony trying to make his billions, or already with billions, knows exactly what he’s doing when he’s being crony.
Understand what I’m not saying. The man who can’t — the kid, the wrecked, the disabled, the robbed — is no parasite. The parasite is the one with options who chooses that path.
The loudest haters can’t see the line
The fiercest billionaire-haters are the democratic socialists. They think in terms of groups. Every person gets sorted into a class — for example oppressor or oppressed — and then judged as the class, because individual agency doesn’t have a place in their neurons. So every billionaire lands in the oppressor bin, and the whole bin gets the pitchfork.
Punishing a whole group for the acts of some of its members has a name in the laws of war: collective punishment. It’s considered a war crime.
Sorting them is my day job
At Crisis Investing, separating the creators from the cronies is built into the lens we hold up to every position. You can earn by being a producer of goods and services, or as the capital standing behind the producers — both good. Sometimes the sharp trade is to watch what the government breaks and put money where the wreckage clears; that’s speculation, and it helps the world mend from the government’s pillaging and incompetence. Or you can choose to climb into the trough yourself, fund the cronies, and take your cut of the stolen loot. Know which one you’re doing every time.
The moral man doesn’t cheer, encourage, or support the coercion of innocents. He speaks against it when he can. And he never hires lobbyists to cajole congressmen or bureaucrats to force strangers to do his bidding.
Celebrate the man who made your life better by moral means, not political ones—whether a billionaire or a local tradesman. Buy his stuff again — he earned it.
The cronies should earn one thing only: your disdain.
How does this fit into the realm of Crisis Investing? The democratic socialists used to be fringe loonies, calling each other comrade in their annual party meetings. Now they are on the rise—still loonies, but not so fringe. It’s not hard to understand why. The major parties in government have been horrendous—crony parasites feasting off the citizens—and the younger generations are sick of it. And it was the left—not the libertarians—who took over education, so the younger generations have been infused with leftist morality, which amounts to collectivist groupthink and the full acceptability of using force to accomplish leftist aims.
America isn’t Europe. Some people here won’t tolerate the ascendancy of the socialists, and won’t accept it quietly.
And if the socialists ascend in the US, they will use force to suppress the resistance, because force is their only tool. Taxation, threats, nationalization, imprisonment for speech. Government power will increase, wealth will be confiscated, poverty will expand, freedom lost.
Crisis from one side as the socialists grow in power, or crisis from the other as people push back against them. Or both. I sure hope crises don’t come. But hope isn’t a plan.
For a plan: I like the concept of working to gain wealth morally—by providing for the needs and wants of other people who voluntarily pay you. And protecting your wealth—to the extent possible—from the robbers. And pushing back against the immorality that the education system is foisting on the youth.
In our Crisis Investing work and recommendations, we try to help you with all of that. Join us by subscribing or upgrading to Premium. And please forward this letter to those you believe might benefit.
Sincerely,
John Hunt, MD
Editor, Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing