Hypocrisy, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

For a large part of my adolescence and adulthood, I considered the atrocities of the masses in the French and Russian revolutions to be nothing short of mindless, misguided villainy. Now, as I've gotten a little older, I'm not so sure.

In both of those cases, the aristocracy and their hangers-on overplayed their hand, which is to say that they didn't stop at merely screwing over the vast majority of their subjects (every ruling class does that), they wanted to screw them over, rub their noses in it, and, to top it off, they had to like it. As Orwell would later write in 1984 (paraphrased), it's not enough that they obey their oppressors, they have to love them too.

Most historians don't believe that Marie Antoinette said "let them eat cake," but as Dan Rather would later say, even if the facts of the story are wrong, it's still true.

All of this brings me to the Marie Antoinettes of the modern age: Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. In the past few years, these two guys have shot past Saturn with a kind of superhuman, bombastic audacity that even Bill Clinton couldn't pull off on his best day.

In case you've been living under a rock, or are clinically retarded, these two guys are the richest men in the world. There's nothing in and of itself wrong with that. Where they've gone wrong is that they think it's OK for them to dodge taxes, but for the rest of us who are formed of the mere common clay, we should be more than happy to contribute more than we do now (I'm speaking in the general "we," I've got doodly squat for dough).

How come I didn't read about it, you say? The answer is you did, except that it was reported as the magnificent duo forming a huge mega foundation that will distribute their excess wealth to "needy causes," which are ones they deem worthy of their money. This means these guys get to spend their money in any way they see fit, and when they die, Uncle Sam won't be able to get a dime, and keep in mind that all the while, these two super nerds were/are advocating a reinstatement of the old government estate (death, if you are a fiscal conservative) tax to previous levels (around 50%).

If congress gets to choose how other inheritances are spent, theirs should be included. Even if the rate was 50%, they'd still have another 50 billion to spend, which will buy a hell of a lot of ego stroking and smug superiority.

How far does one's head have to be up their posterior not to recognize that the fact that you got in on the ground floor of modern computer software or are good at investing does not impart the wisdom of Solomon. And frankly, how far do our heads have to be up our posteriors to let them get away with it.