There are plenty of rich people to hate these days, starting with Bernie Madoff, who faces the possibility of spending his remaining years in a cell where he can think about all the lives he ruined. Is there a Hell painful enough for him? A place where, say, he can listen to Bush economic theorists espouse the joys of toothless regulation while looking at pictures of the Holocaust survivors who are among Madoff ’s victims?
I was thinking of the Ponzi scheme thief and his cellar mates in the dungeon of truly awful rich people — Ken Lay, late of Enron and this world, and Leona “Only the Little People Pay Taxes” Helmsley — while working up a froth of good cheer over some other tycoons.
Bill Gates Sr is 83 years old, six-foot-seven inches tall, with the kind of thin-haired crown that newborn babies and older men have in common. He labours daily trying to give away one of the world’s biggest fortunes, that made by his son. Senior, as he’s known, has a short, big-hearted book coming out next month, Showing Up for Life, which should be handed out to all those hedge-fund managers now filing for bankruptcy or otherwise wondering why their lives are so empty. Hi book is a sort of Last Lecture from the Greatest Generation.
The elder Gates, whom i’ve met in passing here, is a child of the Great Depression who grew up with the fear of being poor. He is also a veteran who went to college on the G I Bill — one of government’s great escalators into the middle class. In the political realm, he is best known for fighting George W Bush’s efforts to repeal the estate tax, a tax he feels is needed to prevent a permanent economic aristocracy in this country.
Warren Buffett, who until the recent meltdown was the world’s richest man (Bill Gates is tops again), is a fellow far-sighted traveller. Like all but the most fraudulent — or cautious — investors, Buffett has lost a pile on paper in the last year. He made news last week when he compared the current crisis to an economic Pearl Harbor. But he was more forgiving than many, saying that we may have to look beyond our anger at the crooks, legal and otherwise, who got us into this mess.
Buffett and Gates father-and-son are following a path blazed by John D Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and other former malefactors of great wealth, in Teddy Roosevelt’s famous phrase. The odd, pinch-faced Rockefeller, considered the richest man in history with a net worth of nearly $200 billion in inflationadjusted dollars, was no saint, and neither was Carnegie.
Carnegie, the steel giant, ran a conglomerate that could show iron-fisted brutality towards its workers. But when he gave back, he gave it nearly all back, and it’s still paying dividends. “No idol”, he said, “is more debasing than the worship of money.”
Travelling through the broken small towns of the Great Plains, i’ve been struck by what is often the one lasting monument in an otherwise bleak community — the Carnegie Library, as much a path to citizenship and the world’s great minds for Mexican meat packers now as it was for poor Irish immigrants a century ago.
Enlightened wealth may seem oxymoronic in this hard year, a time when four million Americans have lost their jobs since the start of the Great Recession while bailed out bank executives continue to spend like Homer Simpson in a doughnut emporium. But there is a better way. I sat with Patsy Bullitt Collins just before this Seattle heiress of a broadcasting empire died of lung cancer a few years ago. She lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment, quietly giving away more than $100 million. But she protested when i suggested that her generosity was a way to return wealth made by her mother. “I don’t give back,” she said. “I give forward.” — NYTNS
Source: The Times of India, Editorial, 17/03/09, By Timoty Egan
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