Icy Indifference

Several of you wrote in response to the unsigned e-mail I posted Tuesday. I won’t waste your time posting the supportive ones (much as I appreciated them). It’s more interesting to post the opposing point of view – not least so its proponents know they’ve been heard.

Juli Bednarzyk: ‘I have been a HUGE fan of your personal finance books since high school when I did a research paper on penny stocks for my senior econ class (I am now 37). I am nearly your opposite politically, (I’m a libertarian, so we have a couple of things in common, but I do consider myself to be ‘right wing’.) I didn’t write that email that came unsigned. But I can sure agree with it 100% and very rarely visit your site since I am disgusted by the political preachings of your site. If I wanted to hear your left-wing drivel, I can turn on CNN/ABC/NBC etc. Please please PLEASE stick to personal finance and how to make good choices and navigate in our rapidly changing economy. Heck, you can even use my name in lieu of the coward who didn’t sign his note. Respectfully – although aggravatedly – yours, Juli Bednarzyk, Plainfield, IL.’

☞ I hear you, Juli. And I am grateful for your kind words. I just respectfully disagree.

It’s almost as if you’re saying you care only about your own finances, not about larger issues. I’m not saying you are saying that, or that you don’t care about those less fortunate than you (although that does seem to be the one huge hole in libertarianism – what do you do about those born physically and/or mentally disadvantaged?) . . . but I do know that FDR – whom you would not have liked and whom many wealthy business people hated – thought societies should be judged on how they treated ‘the least of us.’ And I heard him tonight quoted as having said: ‘The Republicans are frozen in the ice of their own indifference.’ Tom DeLay and Trent Lott, et al, would not appear to be deeply compassionate men. And neither, I’m afraid, for all his protestations, is George W. Bush. Or, for that matter, Clarence Thomas. Indeed, as to Clarence Thomas – and for even more left-wing drivel, as you put it – I commend you to Maureen Dowd’s column yesterday.

And keep your eye on the news today. I think 10 a.m. may be when we find out what Justice Thomas, et al, have decided with regard to the Vice President’s daughter. Can Texas rightly arrest and prosecute her for sleeping with her chosen same-sex lifemate? Or is the law under which this is currently legal – a law George W. Bush supports – unconstitutional? I think we find out today.

‘If this is class warfare, then my class is winning.’
– Warren Buffett