Where Did All Those “Capitalist Pigs” Go?

Billionaires have figured out the faux lefties are exceedingly easy to buy off

“Today’s billionaires’ boys club has come to understand how to make its astonishing wealth acceptable… Set up a tax-exempt foundation, fund it with billions of dollars, invite in liberals to sit on the board, and, at munificent salaries, to run it and distribute its income to liberal causes”

“There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money,” is an insight the famed biographer James Boswell attributed to Samuel Johnson.

Clients of the late Bernie Madoff, however, might take issue.

Over four decades, Madoff, acclaimed as the greatest fraudster of them all, ran a Ponzi scheme that swindled 40,000 people, including his closest friends, out of $65 billion.

But if “getting money” is among the most innocent of callings, America has more than its fair share of the goodly people who excel at it.

According to Forbes’s 35th annual ranking of billionaires, last year witnessed a population explosion. Some 660 new billionaires were added to the number for a total of 2,755.

And more than one in every four billionaires is an American.

According to Forbes, the richest man in the world is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, with $177 billion.

Last year was the fourth in a row that Bezos led the list. His wealth exceeds the entire GDP of almost 150 nations.

Directly behind Bezos, at No. 2, is Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, whose wealth rose to $151 billion.

Numbers 4 and 5 were Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, with $124 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook with $97 billion.

“As a class billionaires added about $8 trillion to their total net worth from last year, totaling $13.1 trillion,” says the Washington Post.

“The United States had the most billionaires, at 724, extending a rapid rise in wealth that hasn’t happened since the Rockefellers and the Carnegies roughly a century ago. China, including Macau and Hong Kong, had the second highest number of billionaires: 698.”

This tripling of the wealth of the world’s billionaires and 30% increase in their number came during a year when America and the West endured the worst pandemic in a century and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.

“While most of the world’s wealthiest people prospered during the pandemic, thanks in part to stock prices,” writes the Post, “millions of Americans grappled with job loss, food insecurity, debt, eviction and poverty.”

Query: Where was the outrage?

In previous times like these, where the rich got richer and the poor and working class rode the rails, we would have heard the excoriations of economic populists and echoes of TR’s “malefactors of great wealth” and FDR’s “forces of entrenched greed.”

But Forbes’ report of the population explosion among billionaires in 2020 passed seemingly without protest.

The dogs did not bark. Why not?

One reason: Whatever one may think of Bezos, Amazon, in 2020, was indispensable for delivering food and medicines to tens of millions of Americans who, given the “lockdowns,” depended on such deliveries for survival. You don’t castigate people providing your food and medicine.

Also, today’s billionaires’ boys club has come to understand how to make its astonishing wealth acceptable, by ingratiating themselves with their old ideological enemies.

Set up a tax-exempt foundation, fund it with billions of dollars, invite in liberals to sit on the board, and, at munificent salaries, to run it and distribute its income to liberal causes. The way to diminish leftist resentment at huge piles of private wealth is to give them a cut.

No wonder Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax went nowhere.

However, they did it, America’s most successful capitalists have learned the lesson some previous generations of capitalists did not — how to preserve their wealth, privilege and economic power and avoid such derisive terms as “capitalist pig.”

Yet, of greater interest, and import, is that the China of the new Great Helmsman, Xi Jinping, a one-party Communist dictatorship, coexists with hundreds of Chinese billionaires.

What would Marx, Lenin, Stalin or the Mao of the Revolution that triumphed in 1949, who put his country through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, say of Chinese oligarchs and plutocrats, each of whom possessed at least a billion dollars in wealth?

Politically, China remains under an ever-tightening Communist rule.

But today, there are inequalities of wealth between the working poor and middle class, and the well-to-do and rich, that would have been anathema to the revolutionaries who founded Communist China.

Is China running a capitalist economy to generate the wealth to consolidate Communist Party control of the nation and grow China’s economic, military and geostrategic power until China displaces America as the first power on earth? So it would appear.

One wonders: Has China found the formula for global ascendancy that eluded the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev?

Use state capitalism and market incentives to build the economic wealth that can be translated into the growth to enable China to ascend to a level of power where it is indisputably the first nation on earth?

Are the Chinese billionaires the geese laying the golden eggs for the Chinese Communist party? Is Communist doctrine being updated to accommodate the most successful Communist country of them all?

Source: Patrick J. Buchanan

5 Comments
  1. tunamelt says

    A leftist is just another name for “useful idiot.”

  2. ken says

    “when America and the West endured the worst pandemic in a century and worst economic collapse since the Great Depression.”

    For Christ sake (lol).

    1. There is no pandemic,,, there is a scamdemic.
    2. There is no covid. Covid is relabeled flu, colds, pneumonia, TB and whatever else they think they can get away with.
    3. The scamdemic did not cause the economic collapse. In America little tyrant despotic governors and their Nazi health ‘experts’ illegally and immorally shut the place down.

    Check out the death rate chart I have attached… Show me where this fictitious disease rates a pandemic or even rates mention. If it wasn’t for government bull horns blasting out fear propaganda I doubt anyone would even know they had it.

    Poor China… The US ‘gave’ them its manufacturing but figured it would take them decades to improve but they took the ball and ran with it. Now they have surpassed America and Americans that cannot produce a toaster oven are upset.

    The American corporations wanted their modern day slaves to remain slaves. Americans would build the factories and the Chinese slaves would manufacture all the products for $ 0.50 cents a day.

    China is called a one party dictatorship…. what do you call a party that uses executive orders to circumvent its constitution? Talk about hypocritical!

    Many places in the US are still locked down for an imaginary flu. Told what they can and cannot do,,, where they can and cannot go. forced to wear masks, some forced to take experimental drugs. This is freedom? This is democracy?

    So here the Chinese are actually forging ahead while the jealous overweight broke Americans distribute their goods. The only thing America manufactures is dollars. 7 or 8 trillion of them in the last couple of years alone.

    We ought to be thanking them for accepting fake dollars for real products. What will we do when they stop? Probably nuke them….

  3. Pablo says

    One reason: Whatever one may think of Bezos, Amazon, in 2020, was indispensable for delivering food and medicines to tens of millions of Americans who, given the “lockdowns,” depended on such deliveries for survival. You don’t castigate people providing your food and medicine.” Pat Buchanan is an outstanding Commentator; his opinions are always worth reading or hearing. Pat nails this one. But I think Billionaires “ingratiating” themselves with the Poor will only go so far. Witness for example Amazon’s (sadly) successful attempt at keeping their business Union free. My point is there IS some pushback to the Billionaires. Sooner or later the Truth will be out there for most everyone to see: the Billionaires have ZERO compassion for the Poor. Anyplace, anywhere.

  4. tobi999 says

    The success of Chinas economy is not communism…it is industrial captialism, with a touch of social responsabilities…..Chinas government offers and creates education, healthcare and infrastructure….its banks are to 80% or more governmnet controlled, money creation just flows in real economy and also real economy growth…while the west has created a fake economy to keep its billionairs aritifcilly rich, by pritining money and buying stocks and housmarket prices up so that the value that the rich posses get aritficially lifted up…their wealth is an illusion…the US and Europe are dying off economically and socially they will become like Africa or Soviet States after the collaps…the 21st Century will not be written in the US nor in Europe but in Asian by China and Russia and India and other Asian countries….

  5. Jerry Hood says

    Buchanan,I know ypur articles since Cowboy Reagan. You moron, China has Communists in power and Capitalists in economy, declaring that they build” harmonious society” for the near future GOLFEN AGE, ruled by GOLD SKINNED Chinese,
    not Yellow skinned , but GOLD SKINNED Chinese!!

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