Wealthy Bozos

I've been critical of Warren Buffett's social views and his views on inheritance. Mr. Buffett is of course not alone in the annals of highly successful people who have a curiously inept grasp of the concepts behind the economic system that provided their success. One must assume that this is a trained incompetence derived from their education.

George Soros is another example. Here you have a brilliant investor who escaped totalitarianism in eastern Europe. Now that he's made a success, he uses his money to attempt to reinstitute the same totalitarian society here that he escaped from in eastern Europe. Mr. Soros has been so incompetently educated that he does not grasp that extending state intervention and politically correct left wing policies encourages totalitarianism. It is tragic that someone as talented as George Soros has been so poorly educated, in his case at the London School of Economics.

Still another example is Mike Bloomberg, New York's Republican tax-and-spend mayor. Bloomberg claimed that he would reform New York's failed and liberal-dominated education system. Bloomberg failed to make any headway with respect to education because he believed that the incompetent liberals who dominate the education establishment and the education schools know something about education--a foolishly mistaken assumption likely derived from his years at Harvard Business School. This excessive respect for academic credentials over and above common sense and empirical experimentation is symptomatic of the trained, other-directed incompetence that characterizes our higher education system.

The City Journal recently pointed out that the regions that most heavily supported Kerry for president were the ones most heavily dominated by people living off trust funds. What a social waste, that those who might be coming up with ideas to help society are committed to a failed left wing model as outdated as the universities that indoctrinated them into it.