Now in the EZ Chair: Jeffrey Sachs
Here’s how the EZ Chair argument might work in reverse: Jeffrey Sachs is an elite of the highest order, a guy who sits in the cozy confines of his Columbia University office (where he attempts to “solve” man-made global warming) without having any clue how the real world works. He’s spent so much time collecting degrees and being part of a university faculty that the idea that people might actually want to work for a living probably makes him queasy. He’s probably written a bunch of scholarly books with high-minded titles implying how smart he is (like “The End of Poverty”) and I bet he’s so “accomplished” that he has three versions of his biography listed on his website: short, medium, and long so that you can select which version you want by how much time you have to read about how perfect he is.
* * *
In his book Who Really Cares? The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism, Arthur Brooks finds strong evidence that charitable giving is influenced by “strong families, church attendance, earned income (as opposed to state-subsidized income), and the belief that individuals, not government, offer the best solution to social ills—all of these factors determine how likely one is to give.”
It turns out that those who believe in classical liberalism tend to give a lot more. Brooks found that “conservative” households gave an average of 30 percent more money to charity than liberal households—even though liberals make approximately 6 percent more. How’s that for “selfish”?
Those who believe that the government, or some federal program, can ever take the place of individual compassion are clearly short on another ingredient that’s imperative for success: intelligence.
THE PLAN
Libertarians are not going to be able to change minds overnight. In fact, that’s part of the problem: we want Americans to move much faster than they ever will. We don’t understand how people could know so little about history that they’re falling for the same tricks all over again. We can’t fathom how people willingly hand over their rights and power to a heartless, soulless, brainless entity.
But libertarians have to understand that there is no quick-fix, Jiffy Lube, thirty-minute solution. The only strategy that has any chance to succeed is to dismantle and reverse-engineer the entire system, brick by brick, until it’s back down to its foundation. Only then can it be built back up the right way. Think about what would happen if you tried to just instantaneously legalize drugs or rip away programs or entitlements that people have been dependent on for generations. Riots if we’re lucky, revolution if we’re not. Either way, libertarian policy would not be high on the agenda at that point.
For decades Americans have been raised to believe that entitlement programs are their God-given right. The only way to overcome that is to teach principles, morals, ethics, and personal responsibility again. That takes time, and I know we’re running out of it, but there’s no other choice—the system has been rotted to the core over the past hundred years. We have to restore it piece by piece, but we first have to make sure that people and families and communities are strong enough to handle it.
About five years ago I was going to write a book called The One-Hundred-Year Plan, about this exact topic. Nobody wanted it. Oh, that’s too long of a time, they told me. No one wants to read about a hundred-year plan; we’ll all be dead by then! Can’t you give us something that will work by the next election?
No! Don’t you see that’s exactly how we got here and why things only keep getting worse? A long time ago a group of people got together and thought outside of the box to develop a hundred-year plan that would make the Constitution essentially irrelevant. They knew they would never see the results in their lifetimes, but that was okay; they just wanted to plant the seeds.
Those are the people that libertarians must now become. We’ve got to think like the Chinese or early-twentieth-century American Progressives, not like political tacticians, campaign managers, or cable news executives who live and die by every daily poll, delegate count, or Nielsen rating.
None of this will be easy. In fact, it may not even be possible—a hundred years of decay is a lot to overcome. But we’ve got to try.
You are holding the first step in your hands right now. It’s the truth. About America, about the threats we face, and about those who are working hard every day to take away our exceptionalism. Only when people truly understand what progressivism has brought us—an educational system that churns out kids who can’t think for themselves, a government that won’t face the truth about Islamists’ agenda for the world, and a media that is complicit in it all—will they be willing to join the fight.
“Everybody says that I have a lot of power. But what does that power consist of? . . . Can I influence governments? I am beginning to be able to. . . . .”
—George Soros, 1995
SOME PEOPLE seem like they were born to play puppet master. (I believe it was the profound philosophers Tears for Fears who said “everybody wants to rule the world.”) Of course, not everybody has the resources to actually pull it off. Not everybody wants to force others to live the way they think is best. Not everyone wants to line their pockets while they manipulate society for their own benefit.
The fact that we all think our ideas are the best ones makes sense. If you thought something else would work better, you’d possibly change your mind. That’s why I believe that one of the most impressive feats accomplished by the founders of this country was to recognize their own imperfection. They created the most brilliant foundation for a country in world history—yet they were smart enough to realize that they might not have thought of everything.
They had a free ride to grab as much power as they wanted in a brand-new country where they were heroes. Yet they spent all of their time devising ways to prevent anyone—including themselves—from ever claiming too much of it. They recognized that only God could grant rights that were self-evident. The federal government would protect those rights, and cede the rest to the states. If something in the Constitution needed to be tweaked, there was the constitutional-amendment process.
All of this resulted in a framework that has been able to handle more than two hundred years of a burgeoning nation’s experimental existence, simply and effectively. It is now the globe’s longest-lasting constitution.
Our Constitution declares that sovereignty shall rest in the people.
Our Declaration proclaims that “all men are created equal.”
I’ve read both of those documents many times and nowhere in them can I find anything that acts to qualify the above two tenets of society. No “but’s,” no “except for’s,” no “unless they really want to’s.” That’s why it’s surprising to see that some people have determined that they are above the law; that their money and influence should somehow afford them more rights, powers, and influence than others.
One of those people is a billionaire named George Soros.
BIRTH OF A BILLIONAIRE
George Soros was born to Tividar and Erzebat Schwartz, nonpracticing Jews, in Budapest, Hungary, on August 12, 1930. According to Soros, his mother was “quite anti-Semitic, and ashamed of being Jewish.” Soros’s father was an attorney by profession, but his main focus seemed to be the promotion of Esperanto, a “universal” (aka “completely made up”) language created during the 1880s. Proponents believed that if the world would share one language, we could eventually achieve one world government and get rid of this silly idea of national sovereignty.
In 1936, two years after Hitler came to power and the attacks on Jews intensified, Soros’s father decided to sever the family’s Jewish roots altogether and change his surname to Soros, a future-tense Esperanto verb meaning “will soar.” When the Nazis occupied Budapest in 1944, Soros’s father purchased forged papers identifying the family as Christians and bribed a fascist Hungarian government official named Baumbach to claim George as his Christian godson. Baumbach took the young Soros, then fourteen, on at least one of his trips to take the
possessions of a Jewish family that had been forced to leave the country.
* * *
Lessons in Esperanto
Marioneto majstro—(n) puppet master
* * *
In December 1998, Soros appeared in a segment of CBS’s 60 Minutes and was asked by Steve Kroft about that experience:
KROFT: I mean, that’s—that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?
SOROS: Not—not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don’t—you don’t see the connection. But it was—it created no—no problem at all.
KROFT: No feeling of guilt?
SOROS: No.
KROFT: For example that “I’m Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.” None of that?
SOROS: [W]ell, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets—that if I weren’t there—of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would—would—would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the—whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the—I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.
In 2000 Soros wrote a foreword to a book by his father, which had originally been published decades earlier. In it, Soros recalled the Nazi occupation of Hungary and described his life during that time in a way that has come across as odd to many people. “It is a sacrilegious thing to say,” he wrote, “but these ten months were the happiest times of my life. . . . We were pursued by evil forces and we were clearly on the side of the angels because we were unjustly persecuted; moreover, we were trying not only to save ourselves but also to save others.”
* * *
ADULT CONTENT
Since this story doesn’t lend itself well to a sound bite, let me be clear: No one is trying to make the case that a fourteen-year-old child was evil for trying to survive. The point is that Soros endured horrors in his childhood that most people can’t even fathom. These are events that would change the life of anyone who experienced them. How Soros has dealt with these events, in a way that he himself admits most see as “sacrilegious” and “strange,” is an undeniably important window into his thought process.
* * *
Soros had made very similar comments a couple of years earlier in the 60 Minutes segment:
It was, actually, probably the happiest year of my life. For me, it was a very positive experience. It’s a strange thing because you see incredible suffering around you and the fact you are in considerable danger yourself. But you’re fourteen years old and you don’t believe that it can actually touch you. You have a belief in yourself. You have a belief in your father. It’s a very happy-making, exhilarating experience.
When the communists swallowed Hungary in 1947, the Soros family relocated to England, where George attended the London School of Economics. In his third year there, he selected the Viennese philosopher Professor Karl Popper as his “tutor.”
Soros would later adopt Popper’s idea of an “Open Society” as a vision of a future governed by universal standards and relativist principles, as opposed to “closed” societies that were based on absolute or “self-evident” truths. The one part of Popper’s philosophy that Soros found objectionable later in life? His admiration for the United States. Popper said his first trip to America “tore me forever out of a depression caused by the overwhelming influence of Marxism in postwar Europe.” He went back twenty-five times, gushing “each time I have been more deeply impressed.”
Soros found that optimism to be fleeting:
Who would have thought sixty years ago, when Karl Popper wrote Open Society and Its Enemies, that the United States itself could pose a threat to open society? Yet, this is what is happening, both internally and externally.
In 1956, Soros moved to New York City. At the time, he admits, he “did not particularly care for the United States. . . . [They] were, well, commercial, crass, and so on.” He had devised a “five-year plan” to save half a million dollars and then return to Europe. Somewhere along the way that plan evidently changed and Soros instead became a citizen. Five hundred grand, after all, was thinking small, and George Soros always thinks big.
* * *
What the Constitution Ought to Be
In his 2003 book, The Bubble of American Supremacy, Soros wrote that the principles of America’s Declaration of Independence “are not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding.” In 2010, the Open Society Institute, which Soros founded, was one of the principal sponsors of a conference on “The Constitution in 2020,” the purpose of which was to produce “a progressive vision of what the Constitution ought to be.” He also described the “bubble of American supremacy” as the greatest threat to world peace.
* * *
He eventually found himself as a portfolio manager at the investment bank Arnhold and S. Bleichroeder and established the “Double Eagle Fund” with $4 million in capital, including $250,000 of his own money. Four years later, the Double Eagle Fund changed its name to the “Soros Fund.” By 1985, the fund had again been renamed, this time to the “Quantum Fund.” It was worth more than $1 billion.
“[A] global open society requires affirmative action on a global scale.”
To turn $4 million into $1 billion, you have to be smart, and Soros has never had trouble being amazed by his own brilliance. When an interviewer once told him, “There are some people who believe it’s possible to be too smart in this business and that the smartest people are rarely the most successful investors,” Soros responded simply: “I hope you are wrong.”
Soros built his fortune not only with smarts, but with an ethical relationship with the rest of humanity that some would call . . . disconnected. Others, like me, for instance, would call it borderline malbonega (that’s Esperanto for “evil”).
* * *
Lessons in Esperanto
Man egema—(adj) Having an intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth or power. Greedy.
* * *
Soros was a speculator who, by his own account, was not constrained by scruples. One of his more notorious exploits was his short-selling of the British pound, forcing a devaluation of the British currency. For those of you who aren’t glued to CNBC, that basically meant that Soros was rooting for the British currency to take a nosedive. He was right, and he pocketed a billion dollars off the trade.
“When I sold sterling short in 1992,” he wrote in his book The Crisis of Global Capitalism: The Open Society Endangered, “the Bank of England was on the other side of my transactions and I was taking money out of the pockets of British taxpayers. But if I had tried to take the social consequences into account, it would have thrown off my risk/reward calculation, and my chances of being successful would have been reduced.”
It’s like a truck driver saying, “Sure, I felt the bumps. But if I stopped to think about the fact that each bump was a human being that I was running over, I would have never made the delivery on time.”
Soros would argue that there is no morality necessary in financial markets because markets themselves are amoral. The British pound, for example, would’ve been devalued anyway—his trade only sped that process up. Or, as the truck driver would say, “Those people would have eventually died at some point anyway.”
* * *
The Ultimate Insider
Markets might not have morals, but they do have rules. In 2005, Soros was fined $2.9 million after a French court convicted him of insider trading in connection with a takeover bid for the bank Société Générale.
* * *
It’s twisted logic, and it’s not necessarily been left in his past. In 2010, as the euro was under immense pressure due to the financial crises in countries like Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, a British newspaper reported that “[a] secretive group of Wall Street hedge fund bosses are said to be behind a plot to cash in on the decline of
the euro. Representatives of George Soros’s investment business were among an all-star line up of Wall Street investors at an ‘ideas dinner’ at a private townhouse in Manhattan, according to reports.”
I guess this proves that playing with economies, and the lives of the taxpayers who participate in them, never gets dull—no matter how much money you have.
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE MONEY
Regardless of morals, Soros was not content with simply accumulating wealth. He had a far more grandiose ambition: to change the world. To achieve this goal he began investing his wealth in tax-exempt organizations whose purpose was not to produce products for people’s consumption, but to produce propaganda for their minds.
These investments began in earnest in 1984 with the creation of the first of his “Open Society Foundations” in Hungary. That was followed in the ensuing years by a series of foundations that he established throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In 1993, Soros established the flagship of his network, the New York–based Open Society Institute (OSI). The stated mission of these foundations was “to build vibrant and tolerant democracies whose governments are accountable to its citizens,” a slogan as believable as a rat-infested diner claiming it serves the “World’s Best Coffee.”