Yes, They Have More Money by Thomas Fleming • August 15, 2006 • Printer-friendly

Warren Buffet has made the biggest “philanthropic” donation in the history of the universe. The largest part of the gift goes to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Why? Obviously, Mr. Buffet is just smart enough to make nearly $40 billion but not smart enough to know how to spend it. Well, then, he thinks, “Who’s smarter than me?” Translated, “Who’s richer than me?” There is only one answer, and that is Bill Gates. Besides, Gates, in devoting himself to misanthropy, has monopolized the headlines. What better way of getting revenge than to give more to Gates’s foundation than Bill has donated himself?

But neither Buffet nor Gates has the slightest idea of what to do with his money. Their “ideas” are the usual clichés of the Left: Kill babies, encourage women to hate their father and husbands, destroy religion and tradition and every other thing that might make life worth living. On top of it all, each, outside his little robber barony, is a miserable life-fearing nerd. It is hard to blame them for supporting leftist causes, when all they know is what they read in the newspapers or see on TV.

How does America produce such pathetic specimens, without blood enough in them to do either bad or good? Now Ted Turner, he is a villain on the heroic scale. As a businessman he frequently acted more like Blackbeard than Buffet; as a womanizer and party animal, he was a legend; and, to top it off, he was a damn fine skipper. Drunk on power—not to the exclusion of other things a man can get drunk on—Turner is capable of saying and doing anything he likes. He is usually wrong, but his “I don’t give a damn attitude” toward what people think has an aristocratic edge to it. Yes, Turner is one mean SOB even to old friends, but from everything I know about him, he is something like a man. He may be going straight to Hell, but, as Screwtape reminds us, people like Turner are unreliable agents of Satan. They have just enough anger and conceit to change their minds. Would Warren Buffet have the nerve to buck Hollywood and finance Gettysburg?

With Buffet, Gates, and too many of the other giants of American business, they have no understanding of the world beyond making more money, and since enjoying life requires knowledge and skill–more like fly fishing than watching TV–they cannot even have a good time on the money they have made . It has taken me several decades of observation to realize what Aristotle and Paul were talking about when they condemned pleonexia, the vice of always wanting more wealth. Paul often associates pleonexia (greed is an inadequate translation) with sodomy. Why? Because both are sterile and emasculating obsessions. Look at the bloated bovine bloodless faces of so many plutocrats. Below good and evil, they are truly to be pitied for what they have done to themselves.

There is much to be said in favor of the classical liberal tradition, even in its extreme libertarian form. But where has this tradition ended up: in the adulation of rich zombies who are the perfect illustration of all that has gone wrong in America life, our stupidity, our weakness and cowardice, our complete inability to enjoy life unless it is enhanced by Japanese computer graphics and soaked in MSG and sugar. A real human being, given a few billion dollars, might make himself dangerous or at least obnoxious, but America’s billionaire’s are too weak and silly to do anything but what will make them Time magazine’s Man of the Year.

I’ve said it many times before, but I’ll say it again: If they’re so rich, why ain’t they smart