Despite Mark Twain's excellent advice, a letter writer opened his mouth [so to speak-Ed.] and removed all doubt about his own ignorance in one of last week's Omaha World-Herald's Letters to the Editor. The man expressed astonishment that Warren Buffett is a (gasp) Democrat and that he supports (gasp) a Democratic candidate for President. He was bewildered that Buffett would be so stupid as to give money to people who want only to destroy the free market system that helped Buffett make his billions in the first place.
What's wrong with this picture? Where do I start? First, the man never seems to have entertained the thought for a nanosecond that Buffett knows more than he, the letter writer, does about markets and what makes their worlds go around . . . and that maybe, just maybe, the letter writer needs to adjust his own attitude instead of thinking Buffett is stupid.
Further, the letter writer never seems to have recognized (unlike Buffett) that there are more important things in life than money, and that the Spider-Man philosophy applies to more than just super powers. "Those who have been given great gifts have great responsibilities." Didn't we used to call that noblesse oblige in the old days?
If anyone out there is reading this, you've heard me say it before, but it bears repeating: humans are social beings. We live in societies. We have obligations to one another if we are to have successful societies. No society that has a cadre of super-duper rich at the top, a large population of very poor at the bottom, and a disappearing middle class which is mostly sinking into poverty and not rising to the level of the super-duper rich, can long endure. No society in all of history lacking a stable middle class ever has.
Not everyone wants to be super-duper rich, believe it or not. Not everyone wants to make a symbolic financial killing. Many of us are content to live a modest life, as long as we have enough to cover our basic needs for clothing, housing, food, utilities, transportation, medical necessitites, and a bit left over for fun or to save for the unexpected disasters (like flooded basements) that inevitably occur.
But this letter writer seems to have swallowed the current right-wing Republican party line . . . and hook . . . and sinker. He can't even see that his position hurts his own economic well-being. He just presumes that a very successful man is stupid because his political and social beliefs don't revolve around the grubbing of money (even though Buffett is very, very good at doing so). He senses there is something wrong with the situation as he sees it, but he draws the wrong conclusion. He exhibits all the classic symptoms of someone who has been brainwashed.
Not to make Buffett out to be a saint. Businesses under his control are frequently much more nasty in the ways they treat their employees than anyone listening to Buffett would expect. I have personal knowledge of the circumstances of several people who were laid off from a Berkshire-Hathaway-owned company with no notice, no warning, and no genuine concern for their well-being, financial and otherwise. This includes more than one person with a physical disability--all of whom had given loyal and dedicated service to said company for over 10 years each (and who'd never received a less-than-positive employee evaluation). I guess all that talk about the company being a family and its success revolving around teamwork was just so much hot air.
Not that I am surprised by this. It's no different in kind from the way the present Bush administration treats its soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen. Just look at the Walter Reed outpatient treatment scandal and also at how Dubya is arguing that a 3.5% pay raise for our troops is too high. He wants to limit it to 3%. That half-percent discrepancy makes a difference in pay averaging only $26 a month if the statistics reported on MSNBC are accurate. That's chump change to the super-duper rich like Dubya, but it's a lot of money to someone in the military who still has to use food stamps to feed his family.
This is one of the reasons Buffett supports the Democrats. Buffett does recognize, in general, that money equals power and power cannot be allowed to reign unchecked, lest it grind into the mud the people who form the basis of a truly stable, successful society. It's just too bad that Buffett's knowledge hasn't trickled down [ironic reference intended--Ed.] to the people he lets handle the day-to-day business of running the machines of his empire.
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