Rich socialists

“It’s always safe to denounce the rich,” said Ellsworth M. Toohey, a character in “The Fountainhead,” a novel by Ayn Rand. “Everyone will help you–the rich first.”

Vice President Albert Gore recently confirmed this axiom when he declared that he would protect the people against “the powerful.” It turns out Mr. Gore himself is part of “the powerful” he regularly denounces in his political speeches.

Gore is a millionaire. He owns at least a million dollars in oil company shares alone (Occidental Petroleum). He is an entrenched power in Washington, D.C. So Mr. Gore apparently wants to protect ordinary people against powerful people like himself.

Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is yet another millionaire out to protect the masses against those ruthless, greedy, evil corporations–some of which he invests in.

Leftists love to wage class warfare, to demonize the rich as habitual exploiters of the masses. They are fond of portraying the rich as selfish and mean-spirited adherents of the free market philosophy, though, in reality, many rich people are themselves collectivist.

Take the old “Robber Baron” Andrew Carnegie. In his book “The Gospel of Wealth,” he came out strongly in favor of the estate tax. As one of the richest men in the world in the early 20th Century, Andrew Carnegie–altruist that he was–actually did not believe that he had a right to his wealth. Like a good liberal, he believed it should be passed on to government, to society, for the uplift of the people.

Many of today’s richest men are certainly not for true free enterprise. Billionaire investor George Soros, for example, also believes in keeping the death tax. In fact, liberal intellectuals are well aware of Mr. Soros views on global capitalism: He actually thinks it poses real dangers.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet is another rich liberal. Buffet also supports the death tax. Believe it or not, Mr. Buffet does not believe he has a right to pass on all of his well earned wealth to his children and has no intention of ever doing so. Like Bill Gates and Ted Turner (who gave $1 billion to the United Nations), Buffet wants to eventually give most of his money away, to government and charity.

Buffet incredibly equates welfare state handouts to family inheritances and faults Republicans for condemning the former but not the latter. For all of his investor brilliance, Buffet apparently cannot tell the difference between (1) robbing Peter to give Paul a welfare check and (2) allowing Peter to freely assign his assets to his heirs. He can’t tell the simple difference between forcible government robbery and voluntary family gift-giving.

Contrary to Albert Gore’s class warfare rhetoric, the powerful are not out to exploit the people and keep most of their wealth to themselves. Indeed, most rich folks are not true free market capitalists. They are imbued with the altruistic distortion. Ellsworth Monkton Toohey was right.