The left has been making a big deal about its hatred for billionaires, hoping the public will buy into its philosophy of envy and rubbish about an economic pie that somehow never expands. They hate them, hate Elon Musk, and in California, for one, are seeking to get voters to take their money away from them, driving many to flee. It is all a gateway to taking money and property away from every little guy who has a house, too.
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According to National Review, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claimed that there was no such thing as someone earning a billion dollars; she claimed that gaining that kind of money requires exploiting labor, breaking laws, or wielding disproportionate market power.
Sen. Bernie Sanders famously claimed, “billionaires should not exist” (and pay no attention to those multiple houses he has).
Sen. Elizabeth Warren has droned on and on about billionaires “not paying their fair share” as she sees fair share, that is.
“The enemy is billionaires,” many leftist campaign slogans say, writes Ira Stoll.
But there’s one billionaire they make an exception for: Dead Cuban dictator Fidel Castro, whose 100th birthday was celebrated this past week.
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than 1,500 activists, diplomats, and solidarity representatives from over 60 countries traveled to Havana for the centenary.
They included British trade unionists, leftist NGOs, and leftist political activists. Al Jazeera has a big photo spread of the festivities here.
Which was ironic: Castro died a billionaire. He got his wealth by taking it from other people, a textbook case of rigging and not paying his fair share, as Fake-Indian Liz ranted about, usually just stealing it outright until there was nothing left to steal. The great historian of Castrodom, Humberto Fontova, once told me Castro owns everything in the country, so his billions are immense, far greater than what I could calculate as a Forbes reporter on the billionaire’s beat, which, when I was there, included Castro.
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This terrific essay by John Suarez from the Center for a Free Cuba lays out just how billionaire-y Castro and his surviving oligarchs are, with a commanding mastery of the facts:
In 2006, Forbes magazine reported that Fidel Castro’s net worth was $900 million (€780 million). One of his bodyguards, Juan Reinaldo Sánchez, who defected, wrote a tell-all book, The Double Life of Fidel Castro: My 17 Years as Personal Bodyguard to El Lider Maximo, detailing Fidel’s 29 luxury homes, four yachts and private island (Cayo Piedra), not to mention other luxuries. This in a country where 89 per cent of the population lives in extreme poverty.
This was not always the case. Prior to the 1959 revolution that ushered the Castro brothers into absolute power for the next 67 years and counting, Cuba had a sizeable middle class and strong labour unions that protected Cuban workers’ rights. Even under the Batista dictatorship, an independent judiciary survived, and Cuban lawyers represented their clients, not the dictatorship.
All of this ended in the months after 1959 and has yet to return. This did not result in the working class taking power, but in a new class of elites seizing and hanging onto power. It is the Castro family, military elites and their inner circle who sit on cash reserves of $18 billion (€15.6 billion), living lives of opulent wealth in Cuba, Europe and the United States, while millions go hungry in Cuba and die of easily treatable diseases.
Instead of spending it on infrastructure, hospitals, or anything else a government should spend it on, they spent it on yachts and tax-shelter accounts, robbing what should have gone to the public good and hiding it from the public.
Now the left is celebrating it. Seems they have double standards on billionaires, and a man like Elon Musk, who earned his fortune by making electric cars and payment systems and converting it into rocket launches to Mars, is the bad guy here, while Castro, who stole and hid his wealth, nothing but a two-bit thief who took a lot of stuff, is the hero.
So the reality is, they don’t hate billionaires at all. They like them if what they do to become billionaires is steal from the public, not serve the public. That is what they like: lionizing bandits while raining hatred on anyone who produces things of value.
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What a disgusting picture.
Image: Pixabay // Pixabay Content License