Treason of the billionaires: History’s lessons

By Martin Hutchinson

This summer has seen a rush of billionaires and their companies donating to left-wing causes, or even giving extraordinary amounts of money to the Joe Biden campaign to defeat President Donald Trump. That is their right, of course. But I find it extraordinary that a majority of the world’s ultra-rich are supporting people whose policies would destroy the system by which they rose. It is worth thinking about why they do it.

It must be remembered that wealth, even self-made wealth, does not directly imply intelligence, especially in societies where social connections, for example through attendance at elite colleges, provide an important boost to those who have them. The plethora of private equity companies since 2000, for example, has made it possible for even quite stupid people to get funding for their start-ups, and thereby become billionaires if they get lucky, provided they have the right “old-school-tie” and express the appropriate “woke” political opinions.

There has always been a certain segment of new wealth whose political opinions diverged from those one would have expected. The new industrialists in Lord Liverpool’s Britain around 1820, for example, tended to be politically Radical – as if they were still the factory workers some (but not all) of them had started as. That led them to ally with the Whigs, whose main policy initiative was a Parliamentary Reform that actually narrowed the franchise, disfranchising many working-class voters (to be fair, the rich industrialists would have had the vote under both old and new franchises, once they became rich enough).

The result was to vote out the followers of Liverpool, who had given the country policies that led to a literally unprecedented prosperity through industrialization, and cement control in a collection of economically illiterate aristocratic Whigs. There were far more Peers in Earl Grey’s Whig Cabinet of 1830 than there had been in Liverpool’s Cabinets, and absolutely no industrialists or even bankers – Alexander Baring, the most able member of that 200-year banking dynasty, had been promised office by the Whigs, but was frozen out by the hyper-snobbish Grey, whereupon he joined the Tory opposition.

Economically, the result of Whig economic mismanagement from 1831 on was an “Engels Pause” that stopped economic expansion in its tracks through the entire 1830s and froze the living standards of working men until the middle 1840s. For working men, matters were made worse by the 1834 Poor Law, passed by the Whigs, that ended cash payments to the indigent and instituted the notorious “workhouses” designed on the principle of “less eligibility” to be less attractive to the poor than everything except starving in the gutter, an alternative which many of them chose.

Only one major industrialist had been Tory in Liverpool’s time – Sir Robert Peel, father of the prime minister and the richest man in Britain at his death in 1830. But then, there are exceptions to everything.

Coming closer to 2020, until the present generation, the self-made very wealthy have tended to lean to the right. The U.S. robber barons were mostly Republicans, certainly Rockefeller, Carnegie and J.P. Morgan were. In my own youth if a businessman was more than marginally to the left, you could be sure he was a crook and you should not do business with him. The classic example of this was Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born billionaire publisher and Labour MP, who drowned himself off his yacht and was found to have embezzled the contents of the Daily Mirror pension fund. When as an executive committee member of the London branch of a European bank I suggested we should reduce or eliminate our exposure to Maxwell, I was mocked – to the extent they took my views into account, it was the best thing I ever did for them!

The rule of thumb that any self-made billionaire leftist in a reasonably functioning capitalist economy must be a crook was based on two philosophical theorems. First, an honest billionaire would value the society and economic system under which he had risen, and so be generally in favor of capitalism, a system that would allow others to repeat his success. (In theory, he might be a very unpleasant individual who wanted to keep everyone else down, but in that case, he was short on moral fiber and might well be fiddling the accounts, too.) Second, an honest billionaire would want to keep taxes on his earnings and capital at reasonable levels, and hence would oppose anything to the left of moderate liberalism (in the American sense.)

There are three reasons why this equation does not work any more. First, the capitalist system no longer appears to work as well as it did; billionaires who have enriched themselves under today’s version of capitalism may have no clear idea of why they have become rich. Second, tax loopholes, havens and shelters have proliferated, to the extent that the very rich believe that higher taxes can be imposed only upon the “little people” and that they can avoid most of them. Third, the social returns from “virtue signaling” have become immense, and the social exclusion from failing to do so has become inexorable – nobody wants to be President Trump.

Since 1995, the Fed has set U.S. interest rates by fiat, far from the level a free market would dictate. Since 2008, the world’s other central banks have followed suit. This has caused a massive rise in asset prices, and the creation of an overwhelming volume of spurious private equity funds and hedge funds seeking to take advantage of those rising asset prices. In the real economy, it has brought declining productivity growth, new business formation and innovation in general. An additional factor has been globalization and the Internet, which have allowed billionaires to make spurious additional profits, sheltered from tax in havens, by outsourcing good American and European jobs to filthy sweatshops in the Third World.

Since today’s billionaires have benefited from the current system, they naturally favor it. However, that no longer drives them to favor capitalism, since the system is no longer truly capitalist. Instead, they favor low interest rates, “funny money” rising asset prices, outsourcing, massive imports of artificially cheap labor and ‘woke socialism.’ By such means, they hope to avoid serious competition from the next generation, who could in principle equally build a ziggurat of wealth on borrowed ultra-cheap money. Rectifying economic policy by stopping “indentured servitude” H1B and H2B visas and by “Volckerizing” the Fed or imposing a zero inflation target (which is actually in the Humphrey-Hawkins Act – the Fed just ignores the legislation) would impoverish billionaires – and open the roads to wealth for everybody else.

The tax problem can also be solved fairly easily. Billionaires suddenly go conservative when their own tax bills rise, as evidenced by the huge squawking from New York and California billionaires when the Trump administration rightly limited the deductibility of state and local taxes. Other loopholes include the taxation of private equity “carried interest” payments, ridiculously taxed as capital gains. However, the most egregious and expensive tax deduction for billionaires is that for charitable donations. As the Clinton family have demonstrated, that can be used to shelter vast amounts of income, licit or illicit, without any significant connection to genuine charity at all. Closing that loophole would make a huge number of billionaires “fly right” as well as closing down a plethora of spurious and tacky “charitable” events and fundraisers.

As for the social returns for virtue signaling, they are huge. They can be reduced by abolishing the charitable tax deduction, which would make much “virtue signaling” very expensive, and by raising interest rates, which would introduce a cadre of new uncouth billionaires who actually believed in capitalism. However, there are organizational changes to be made here, too – for example de-funding the ridiculous Business Roundtable, which pushes companies to devote their businesses to virtue signaling rather than profit maximization.

By defunding the most leveraged and spurious billionaires, closing their tax loopholes and reducing opportunities for virtue signaling, we can slowly return the moral outlook of the very rich to a proper respect for free markets and capitalism. Because of their wealth and power, that will make life better for all of us.

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Tens of Thousands of Christians Converged on DC and Trashed the City

Did you hear about the large Christian gatherings in Washington, DC this weekend? Did you see the news reports about the mayhem? The looting? The vandalism? The calls to “Burn it down!”? Did you hear the speakers calling for acts of violence and destruction? Oh, you didn’t? That’s because tens of thousands of Christians did gather in DC this weekend, but they came to pray for the nation and repent for their sins.

The two main events were The Return, which began Friday night and ended Saturday night, and Franklin Graham’s prayer march, which was held from noon to 2:00 p.m. Saturday afternoon.

Both events attracted tens of thousands, and The Return was watched by a reported global audience of tens of millions. But there were no angry voices. No calls for violence. No fistfights. Or brawls. Or looting. Or shooting at police.
In fact, at The Return, where I participated on Saturday, there was hardly any police presence at all. It was not needed. I didn’t even see any counter-protesters.

Worship prevailed. Prayer prevailed. Humility prevailed. Repentance prevailed.

And while a constant theme of the event was the broken condition of America and the urgent need for repentance, that repentance started with the participants, with each of us. We, the followers of Jesus, have sinned and fallen short. We who are called to be light of the world and the salt of the earth have not lived up to our high and lofty calling.

That’s why The Return began its Saturday morning program with pastors and leaders asking for God’s mercy and confessing their sin. Repentance starts with us.

Significantly, Saturday was also the day when President Trump announced his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Who could have foreseen this? These events were planned months in advance, at which time no one had any idea that Justice Ginsburg would pass away, let alone pass away during this sacred season on the biblical calendar.

Even the timing of Trump’s announcement seemed propitious. As I tweeted, “So, Ruth Bader Ginsburg passes away at the beginning of the Jewish New Year, as the shofar blast is heard, & Amy Coney Barrett is announced as her replacement as shofars were being blasted at The Return event in DC, watched by 10s of millions globally. Coincidence?”

On this same day, Saturday, September 26, 2020, major prayer gatherings were held in the Philippines and other nations as well. (An Asian leader told me at The Return that three million Indonesian Christians participated in a prayer event just hours earlier).

But this is exactly what we must do. We are in the midst of a global pandemic, a global shutdown, a time of global shaking – and that means there nothing more important we can do than pray. All the more does this hold true in America, where deep divisions are literally tearing us apart.

But the goal of these gatherings is not to impress people. The goal is not to put on a performance and please the crowds. The goal is to get the attention of our Father in Heaven. Only He can turn the hearts of a nation. And only He can hold back His judgment and wrath.

In Jewish tradition, the constellation sign associated with Tishrei, the seventh (and current) month of the biblical calendar (but the first month of the traditional calendar), is a pair of scales, symbolizing the scales of justice.

As one Jewish website explains, “The symbol of the month of Tishrei is a pair of scales. How fitting are the scales of justice to this month! On the Day of Judgment, Rosh Hashanah, our good deeds and mitzvos (commandments) are weighed against our sins. If we have more mitzvos than sins, we are inscribed for another year of life.

Obviously, this is not a quantitative evaluation, that is, the number of offenses verses the number of good deeds. The judgment takes into account the quality of our deeds.”

Yet even with the very best quality of deeds, and even when we work our hardest, there is no way America could survive a test like this, weighing our good deeds against our bad deeds. How much weight does a single abortion carry, let alone tens of millions? How much weight does a single act of sex trafficking carry, let alone tens of thousands?

That’s why we plead for mercy. That’s why we repent so deeply. That’s why, in the synagogues, beginning Sunday night, Jewish prayers will focus on pleas for mercy and lengthy confessions of sin. There is no boasting of our own righteousness in the sight of a holy God.

That’s why these gatherings in DC, with minimal press coverage and without the drama of the protests and the riots, could well be the thing that saves the nation. And while the media may not have paid sufficient attention, we trust that God Himself did. That is what really matters.

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Current idiocies

Seventeenth-century poet and intellect John Milton predicted “when language in common use in any country becomes irregular and depraved, it is followed by their ruin and degradation.”

Gore Vidal, his 20th-century intellectual successor, elaborated, saying: “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate.” Sloppy language permits people to get away with speaking and doing all manner of destructive nonsense without being challenged.

Let’s look at the concept of “white privilege,” the notion that white people have benefited in American history relative to, and at the expense of, “people of color.” It appears to be utter nonsense to suggest that poor and destitute Appalachian whites have white privilege. How can one tell if a person has white privilege? One imagines that the academic elite, who coined the term, refer to whites of a certain socioeconomic status such as living in the suburbs with the privilege of high-income amenities. But here is a question: Do Nigerians in the U.S. have white privilege? As reported by the New York Post this summer, 17% of all Nigerians in this country hold master’s degrees, 4% hold a doctorate, and 37% hold a bachelor’s degree, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey. By contrast, 19% of whites have a bachelor’s degree, 8% have master’s degrees, and 1% have doctorates.

What about slavery? Colleges teach our young people that the U.S. became rich on the backs of free black labor. That is utter nonsense. Slavery does not have a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South and outlawed in most of the North. I doubt that anyone would claim that the antebellum South was rich, and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished — Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia — while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was outlawed: Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.

Speaking of holding people accountable for slavery, there is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. There would not have been much black slavery in the U.S., and the western hemisphere in general, without Africans exchanging other Africans to European slave traders at the coast for guns, mirrors, cloths, foreign alcoholic beverages, and gold dust. Congressional Democratic lawmakers have called for a commission to study reparations, but I have not heard calls to hold the true perpetrators of American slavery accountable. Should we demand that congressional Democrats haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Muslim states before Congress to condemn them for their role in American slavery and demand they pay reparations?

Some of the greatest language mischief is related to terms such as racial “disparities,” “gaps,” and “disproportionality.” These terms are taken as signs of injustice that must be corrected. The median income of women is less than that of men. Black and Hispanic students are suspended and expelled at higher rates than white students. There are other race disparities and gaps all over the place. For example, blacks are 13% of the population but 80% of professional basketball players and 66% of professional football players, and on top of that, they’re some of the most highly paid players. To be consistent with leftist ideology, those numbers seem to suggest that there is some kind of injustice toward Asian, white, and Hispanic basketball and football players. But before we run off thinking that everything is hunky-dory for black players in football, how many times have you seen a black player kick an extra point in professional football?

What should be done to address these and other gross disparities? How can we make basketball, football, dressage and ice hockey, classical music concert attendance, not to mention incarceration, look more like America? In general, we should ignore disproportionality. There is no evidence, anywhere in the world, suggesting that people sort out in any activity according to their numbers in the general population.

The best thing that we can do is clean up our language. That will have the added benefit of straightening out our thinking so that we do not permit leftists to get away with making us feel guilty and believing in utter nonsense.

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Donald Trump Gets His THIRD Nobel Prize Nomination

This month, two Arab Muslim states — Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — normalized relations with the Jewish State of Israel, an earth-shattering diplomatic breakthrough long considered utterly unthinkable. Shortly before that, two Balkan countries put aside their historic enmity and normalized relations — and promised to open embassies in Jerusalem, recognizing the City of David as the capital of Israel. Each of these separate deals would be enough to get Trump in the history books, and the president has received three nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize in the wake of these tremendous accomplishments.

One Norwegian parliamentarian and one Swedish parliamentarian each nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Norwegian, Christian Tybring-Gjedde, highlighted the historic UAE peace deal while the Swede, Magnus Jacobsson, focused on the Serbia-Kosovo deal.

On Monday, Sky News reported on a third Nobel Prize nomination for Donald Trump, this time coming from four law professors in Australia. Law professor David Flint announced he was nominating Trump on the basis of the “Trump Doctrine.”

“He went ahead and negotiated against all advice, but he did it with common sense. He negotiated directly with the Arab states concerned and Israel and brought them together,” Flint told Sky News.

Flint described the Trump Doctrine as “something extraordinary,” based on “common sense” and “national interest.”

“What he has done with the Trump Doctrine is that he has decided he would no longer have America in endless wars, wars which achieve nothing but the killing of thousands of young Americans,” the professor argued. “So he’s reducing America’s tendency to get involved in any and every war.”

“The states are lining up, Arab and Middle-Eastern, to join that network of peace which will dominate the Middle-East,” Flint added. “He is really producing peace in the world in a way in which none of his predecessors did, and he fully deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.”

While President Barack Obama campaigned on peace and withdrawing from Iraq, he also sent U.S. troops into Syria. His withdrawal tragically enabled the growth of the Islamic State (ISIS).

President Trump also promised an end to America’s endless wars, and his approach has proven more successful. Trump invested heavily in the U.S. military, aiming to achieve peace through strength. He is scaling back U.S. troops in foreign lands. Trump has encouraged hydraulic fracturing and other energy developments that made America no longer reliant on Middle-Eastern oil.

For decades, countries like the UAE and Bahrain refused to recognize the Jewish state, standing in solidarity with the Palestinians and likely terrified of nearby Iran and its Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which had a massive presence in the Middle East before Soleimani’s death.

Trump shook up the Middle East by moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, abandoning the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, and assassinating the terrorist Soleimani. Experts warned that these moves would spark a war, perhaps even a world war. Yet these historic events laid the groundwork for a massive transformation in Middle East diplomacy — a previously unimaginable transformation.

Indeed, it is difficult for Americans to realize just how monumental this diplomatic shift is. Before the signing of the Abraham Accords, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia announced they would open their skies to Israeli flights to the UAE. As part of its rapprochement with Israel, the UAE agreed to order hotels to serve Kosher foods in Abu Dhabi, delivering a powerful symbol of Jewish acceptance in a notoriously anti-Semitic part of the world.

In Europe, the Balkans are a notoriously fiery region, with centuries-long animosities sparking multiple wars, including World War I. The dueling Muslim and Christian empires of Turkey and Austria-Hungary wrestled to rule over ethnic groups that hated one another and religious minorities that proved a thorn in any ruler’s side. Yet Trump brought Muslim-majority Kosovo and Christian-majority Serbia together for a historic agreement that included promises to set up embassies in Jerusalem.

If Democratic nominee Joe Biden wins in November, he may undo much of this impressive progress by reinstating the Iran nuclear deal. Unfortunately, much of the legacy media has effectively buried news of these historic diplomatic developments. If Trump wins the Nobel Peace Prize, however, it would be impossible to deny his extraordinary successes.

President Barack Obama received a Nobel Peace Prize for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen diplomacy and cooperation between people.” President Donald Trump should receive a Nobel Peace Prize for his extraordinary results at establishing historic diplomacy in the Middle East.

Sadly, it remains unlikely that the Nobel committee will honor Trump’s success in this arena. The Nobel committee is likely to get too stuck on “Orange Man Bad” to reward the orange man’s historic results in the same way it honored Obama’s efforts.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American “liberals” often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of other countries. The only real difference, however, is how much power they have. In America, their power is limited by democracy. To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already very powerful: in America’s educational system — particularly in the universities and colleges. They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did: None. So look to the colleges to see what the whole country would be like if “liberals” had their way. It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. Email me (John Ray) here.
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