I have nothing at all against Warren Buffett. He made his money fair and square and I don't begrudge him a dime (though I wish he would give me a measly million or two. He wouldn't miss it and it would make me deliriously happy --- ever since I discovered that money does buy happiness. Or at least it pays for the kind of misery I enjoy).
I have a few quibbles with Mr. Buffett, however. The first is that he seems to think he's heroic by assuring us that his soak-the-rich tax recommendations apply to him as well as others and therefore he should be congratulated. Baloney, Mr. Buffett. In the first place, if the income tax were raised to a highest bracket of one hundred percent it would not affect you adversely to any extent whatever. You would still be left with multiple times as much money as an army of men could spend in a lifetime. You wouldn't even notice it. You already give away huge amounts of money to charitable causes. That's great. I hope you keep it up. But stop acting as if that makes you Mother Bountiful. You still have enough for that army. That's fine with me --- really. Just cut the crap.
Another thing about that. While a high income tax would have no personal affect on you, it would adversely affect millions of people who aren't rich by any stretch but would like to become rich and are working diligently toward, they hope, that result and in the process producing some of the world's goods. As far as I can tell you never produced anything that anyone can eat, drive, burn for fuel, live in or wear. You shuffled papers around and activated electronic blips on computers which fed or housed or transported no one. That's OK. It was legal and it may even have served some esoteric purpose in the world of higher economics which I can't roam around in because I don't undertand it and doubtless never will. I'm perfectly satisfied that you can buy what you want and play lots of bridge with your pal Bill Gates.
Buffett is obviously an intelligent man. You would have to be more than just a little bit bright to accumulate the mountain range of cash that he has. But does he really believe that by screwing the "rich" out of their money and throwing it around in an orgasm of redistribution he would make everyone affluent and happy? What is economics about? It's about the production, allocation and distribution of goods and services. And that's all it's about, though it breaks down into quite a few subdivisions. How does throwing cash around, by itself, produce one single box of raisin bran or one ping pong ball, a car, a map of Omaha or a recipe for ten ways to cook spinach? You can, of course, take cash from Peter and pay Paul but that doesn't produce wealth, it just divides what is already there. Paul buys a football that Peter would have bought if we hadn't taken his money. Yes, the economics gurus can doubtless spin some theories on how we have stimulated the production of footballs, and they may even be right. Not every "expert" is wrong about everything all the time. But in the meantime where do we go to get our chocolate covered chunkies if they are no longer produced because Peter, who produced them, went out of business or just decided to pack it in because he no longer has any incentive to produce anything? And who will give his factory workers jobs now that they are out of work?
There may be answers. I'm not an economist and I'm not as smart as Mr. Buffett. If I were I would be writing this on the yacht I don't have. But surely we are not out of line if we ask him to give us some answers to these questions before we go overboard praising him for being such a grand and noble chap.
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