Warren Buffett became a media hero by giving away some of his money. Never mind that he created an investment empire that enabled tens of thousands of Americans to earn money through investments and working. He was elevated to public sainthood when he started giving away the money he had worked for.
Ranked behind Bill Gates as the second-richest man in the world, Buffett created quite a stir with the announcement that he would give away some 85 percent of his vast fortune to charity. That’s about $30 billion—by far the largest gift in the history of corporate philanthropy.
Sorry…but all I can say is, Big deal.
All right, I know you might think this makes Warren a very special guy. The media certainly thought so. After his announcement the media fawned over him as if he had discovered a cure for baldness, age spots, and body odor in one swell foop.
Nice job, Warren. But, still, you’re going to be left with—what? $5 billion? $6 billion? $15 billion? So spare me your moral exhibitionism. Sure, you’re giving away a lot of money, but even the leftovers will dwarf what most people make in their entire lives—hell, what the residents of most towns, all together, make in their whole lives. Your progeny won’t exactly be worrying about paying the light bill.
So it’s not as though you agreed to a premortem organ donation, now, is it?
There are many Americans out there who really do give till it hurts. They give so much of themselves and their earnings that they’re left with financial struggles for the rest of their lives.
Figure this one out: If someone takes a fortune and gives it away, he’s inevitably anointed as a hero. Statues are commissioned in his honor; bridges are renamed in tribute. If someone else takes a fortune and uses it to begin a hugely successful business—one that employs thousands of workers, bolsters our economy, and provides a useful product or service—he’s either ignored or placed in the ranks of evil corporate capitalistic predators who drink the blood of minimum-wage workers as part of some IPO ritual that takes place only under a full moon.
Give money away: Good Guy.
Use money to make money: Bad Guy.
Warren Buffett gives money away. Bill Gates gives money away. All the rest of us just sit back and wait for the inevitable moment when some mindless journalist or pundit pops out of a hole somewhere to tell us that these men are “giving back!”
They’re not “giving back,” you footstools!1 They’re “giving”!
Sometimes just using the phrase “giving back” isn’t enough. After Buffett announced his grand benevolent gesture, the nicely coiffed talking heads on ABC’s Good Morning America were heard yammering about how Warren Buffett was preparing to “give back” some of his “winnings.”
Now there’s a curious turn of a phrase: “Give back some of his winnings.” There I was, all this time, operating under the clearly mistaken assumption that Warren Buffett had actually earned that money. I thought he worked for it. Now I learn that somehow—somewhere—he’d actually won it, and now he’s going to give some of it back!
Perhaps the good Mr. Buffett will step forward and clear the air on this issue. What’s the story, Warren? Did you win that money? Was it given to you? ABC can’t seem to make up their minds; maybe you can help us out.
To be fair, I don’t believe Warren Buffett actually used the words “give back” himself. Bill Gates, however, has.
Specifically, Gates described his philosophy as one “of giving back my wealth to society.” Now, Bill Gates has a lot of money. In fact, his time is so valuable that the mere act of breaking stride to bend over and pick up a $100 bill on the sidewalk would cause him to actually lose money. What shocks me is that, according to Gates himself, this extraordinary wealth was given to him—a nicely wrapped present, apparently, from our generous society.
We need someone to blame for this orgy of self-indulgent “giving back,” so I’m nominating Ted Turner. Why not? He’s an affable sort of guy—and besides, he gave a billion bucks to the United Nations. When you give that much money to an organization dedicated to anti-Americanism, you’re fair game for just about anything.
Turner is another rich guy who just can’t seem to bring himself to admit that he worked for his wealth: “Since I’m very privileged,” Turner is quoted as saying, “I try to give back to the world what the world has given me.”
But “giving back” his own money didn’t satisfy Turner. He wanted to “give back” other people’s money, too. And so, in 1997, Turner started badgering Gates and Buffett to jump on the charity band wagon with him. Thus my effort to hang him with the blame.
“What good is wealth sitting in the bank?” Turner asked. “It’s a pretty pathetic thing to do with your money.” (Almost as pathetic as losing it all in bad deals with Time Warner and AOL. But that’s another story for another day.)
But take a moment to ponder Ted’s question. Does money do any good sitting in the bank? Ted considers that a pathetic thing to do with your money. I consider Ted’s perspective pretty pathetic. Let’s look more closely.
A young couple needs a loan to pay some unexpected medical bills. They go talk to their local bank. A brief credit and employment check looks good, and the young couple gets the loan. Where did the money for the loan come from?
From those pathetic losers who let their money sit in a bank, that’s where!
A businessman goes to talk to his banker about a loan to expand his business. He excitedly tells the banker that his market study shows great potential for growth, as long as he expands and hires more people. The banker agrees, the loan is made, the business is expanded, jobs are created. New businesses are created to cater to the needs of the expanded company and the new employees. More jobs. More economic growth. Naturally, the entire community benefits. Again…where did the money come from?
From those pathetic losers who let their money sit in a bank!
Gee, Ted, maybe you’re on to something, I don’t know. But then, where would we get our next car loan? Unless…maybe you’d be willing to give us the money yourself? You know, give a little something back to the world?
A prominent business newspaper reports that my hometown of Atlanta will lead the nation’s metropolitan areas in the creation of new millionaires over the next five years. Sounds like a good time to be living and working in Atlanta, doesn’t it?
But wait!
It’s not as though these new millionaires are actually going to work for their money. It’s not just the leftist saps on Good Morning America who believe that wealth is won by the wealthy, or given to them. Check out this lead paragraph in a story appearing in the Atlanta Business Chronicle: “Multiplying millionaires will dramatically alter the way Atlantans live, shop, bank and give back over the next several years.” Yup, there it is again. “Give back” is like kudzu—ugly and everywhere.
Newsweek has even established something they call the “Giving Back Awards.” They’ve chosen fifteen “winners” who are helping other people by “giving back.” The honorees included entrepreneurs such as Pierre Omidyar, who built a sizeable fortune with what is now known as eBay; Brad Pitt, who takes home big paychecks for being handsome; and Randy Rusk, a Colorado rancher.
Notice a trend here? You’d have to be stupid or a Democrat (sorry for the redundancy) not to. “Giving back” is now the conventional (leftist) wisdom. Nobody—especially not the evil, wretched rich—actually earns anything anymore. Fortunes aren’t earned but won or freely given.
Why do liberals think this way? Because they find it impossible to acknowledge that people work for money. What about you? Chances are you didn’t win whatever money you have, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t given to you. You probably traded some rather large hunks of your life, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year, working for that money. Now some leftist ass or TV talking head comes along and suggests that whatever you have, whatever you’ve labored to earn, whatever you’ve sacrificed to save…is nothing but “winnings.” Golly! How lucky you’ve been!
Words have meanings, and meanings create consequences. We try to tell our children that if they work hard and smart they can grow to be comfortable, if not rich. So when we tell our children that those who have actually accumulated some wealth didn’t actually work for it, what’s the message we’re sending?
You can just hear the unruly teenagers now. “Come on, old man! Which is it? Do you want me to work hard, make good choices, and keep my nose to the grindstone so I’ll have enough money to keep you and Mom out of the nursing home fifty years from now? Or do you want me to sit around and wait for someone to give it to me?
“Am I supposed to work for my money, or do I get to win it?”
We’re creating a whole new language here, and it certainly isn’t by accident. The left has never been fond of acknowledging the value of hard work, perseverance, and good decision-making in acquiring wealth. After all, any good leftist knows that wealth is distributed, not earned. Thus the extraordinary lengths to deny people the credit for the hard work that goes into wealth accumulation.
In 2006, Edward L. Rubin, the dean of the Vanderbilt University Law School, wrote a widely published opinion piece promoting the concept of wealth confiscation and redistribution.
“At present,” Rubin wrote, “the top fifth of the population receives more than 59 percent of the nation’s annual income, while the bottom fifth receives around 3.5 percent.”
Ahhh…another weasel word to add to the list: “Receive.”
Let me try to explain it another way. During the 2006 NFL season, the Atlanta Falcons had a particularly bad game against the New Orleans Saints in the Georgia Dome. As the team was leaving the field, the fans started heaping abuse on quarterback Michael Vick. Vick had just run more than 150 yards during the game; it certainly wasn’t his fault that his receivers dropped about 300 yards’ worth of on-target passes. So Vick did what any red-blooded American would do under those circumstances: When he heard the fans booing, he gave the mighty finger to the fans…twice, once with each hand. Now that was giving back. He hadn’t earned that abuse, so he gave it back to those who had tendered it.
Later, the NFL declared that Vick should pay $20,000 ($10,000 per finger) for his little demonstration, and that $10,000 of that should go to charity. Vick then made a series of donations to some Atlanta charities. Can you guess what happened next?
You got it: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution headlined the story on its Internet site “Michael gives back.”
This is more than a semantic argument, folks. I’m talking about a deeply flawed concept that leads to some deeply flawed thinking. My favorite example comes from a recent article in the San-Antonio Express News.
“Children raised in affluent families have their own unique set of challenges,” the article states. “The wealth that rich parents share with them could hinder them from being fulfilled, productive members of society. If, indeed, they are mentored early, they can give back to future generations many times over.”
Did you catch that? Give back to future generations?
That’s a pretty neat trick, but as far as I know, even DeLoreans can’t really travel back and forth through time. So it probably isn’t worth your time to sit around hoping Doc Brown is going fire up the flux capacitor and drive through a hole in the space-time continuum to drop off a bundle of dough from some long-dead relative.
All this giving-back nonsense completely negates the reality that the people doing all of this donating actually earned what they’re giving away through hard work, good choices, responsible decision-making, and perseverance. Something in the illogical and irrational way liberals perceive our world has rendered poisonous the very idea that anyone who has achieved great wealth actually did so through hard work.
“Oh,” your typical liberal will say, “they didn’t earn that great wealth, they inherited it!” Right. Tell that to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. Neither of these men was born into poverty, but they certainly didn’t inherit their billions. Gates, a college dropout, started Microsoft and the Windows revolution. Buffett, whose grandfather owned a grocery store, invested wisely—again and again.
The inconvenient truth for the wealth-redistributionist left is that fewer than 2 percent of millionaires in this country inherited their wealth. This giving-back hooey is just their attempt to negate the idea that people actually work for what they acquire. And it’s affected our culture in deep-seated ways.
From our hideous government schools onward, we are hammered constantly with messages, both subliminal and blatant, that whatever we may have is ours not as a result of our own efforts; not as a result of the years of our lives that we have sacrificed; but because of the luck of the draw or someone else’s largesse.
The goal of the left is to acquire and maintain political power. One of their most effective tools in this quest is their perceived compassion—compassion that’s shown by spending someone else’s money. If they are seen as confiscating wealth that was actually earned, that could be interpreted as, well, unfair. So they’re happy to promote the fantasy that the money they’re confiscating has been won in some grand game of chance. After all, that way they’re just evening out the odds a bit.
And if the general perception is that the wealthy have been given most of their fortune, even better: Why not ask (that is, demand) that they give some of it back?
Here’s a thought for Warren Buffett: If he finds himself in any hardship after all the giving back he’s done, he should just let us know. Maybe we’ll give him some of his stuff back to help him ease the pain.
Wait a minute! That actually would be giving back, wouldn’t it?