What Rich Businessmen Want From Government
22nd September 2011
Tim Carney points out that it’s mostly more cowbell.
Let’s start with the assertion, for which Yglesias offers zero evidence, that “rich businessmen inevitably wind up reaching the view that lower taxes on rich businessmen.”
Who’s the richest businessman in America? Bill Gates of Microsoft. Gates has supported a ballot initiative to raise taxes on the rich. Gates also has spent money to preserve the estate tax.
The second richest man in America is Warren Buffett. Buffett loves taxes on rich businessmen so much that Barack Obama has named a tax on rich businessmen after Warren Buffett. He’s with Gates on keeping the death tax.
Third place is Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. I can’t find his statements on taxes, but his political giving of the last 20 months — all to Democrats, including Harry Reid — doesn’t suggest someone desperately trying to lower taxes.
Numbers 4, 5, and 8 — Charles and David Koch and Sheldon Adelson — seem to hold the views on taxes and regulation Yglesias attributes to all rich businessmen. But the rest of the top 10 haven’t been reading enough Yglesias to know where they’re supposed to “inevitably” end up.
The Waltons of Wal-Mart wealth are generally conservative, but their company is hardly hammering away for “less regulation of their business.” Yglesias knows this, too, because when Wal-Mart called for a mandate on employers like Wal-Mart, requiring them to provide health-care for employees, the announcement was made in conjunction with Yglesias’s employer CAP, and Yglesias touted it as “an important sign that change is in the air.” Wal-Mart has also lobbied for a higher minimum wage.
Oh, and the only really rich businessman in the Forbes Top 10 I haven’t named yet?
George Soros.
I don’t really have to touch that one, do I?
For all of the class-warfare rhetoric, rich people are mostly Democrats. Why? Well, it might be because, for all of the class-warfare rhetoric, Democrats of the upper class are really most comfortable with other upper-class Democrats. AlGore wrings his hands about global warming and air pollution while living in a ‘house’ that uses as much electricity as a small city. No Kennedy or Rockefeller now living has ever worked a day at a Real Job in his (or her) life. Any objective review of the available evidence will show that Democrats are far more the Party of the Rich than Republicans ever were. Just look at the chief modern icons of each party: Ronald Reagan worked his way up from poverty out in Flyover Country, while FDR was born with a silver spoon in every available orifice with a set left over for his lovely wife Eleanor.
September 22nd, 2011 at 13:46
Maybe all (or most, since we don’t know much about the folks #11~??) are Democrats or Democrat-leaning is that true entrepreneurship isn’t really a conservative trait. Entrepreneurs have more in common with “liberals” than you would at first think.
Conservatives act to conserve. They work to maintain the status quo ante; they are anathema on change. They fear loss more than they hope for gain. (They are not alone in this; it is well-demonstrated through various testing results that most people fear of loss is a stronger motivater than hope for gain.)
But entrepreneurs want change; they want to change their lives, their circumstances, and the buying habits of the public. They look for the new, and gamble on being able to shape it to their profitable ends. They aren’t afraid to lose, or at least not afraid enough to prevent them from rolling the dice.
When you look down this list, it becomes apparent that none of them would have become rich if they hadn’t actively sought out and embraced change. Folks who are satisfied with what is aren’t likely candidates to be pioneers.