Shaming wealth's creators

02.03.2014

By Michelle Malkin 

America, we have a bullying epidemic. No, not the school-bullying issues that get constant attention from Hollywood and the media. The problem is wealth-shaming.

Recently a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His passionate letter to The Wall Street Journal decried the “progressive war on the American 1 percent.” He called on the left to stop demonizing “the rich” and he condemned the Occupy movement's “rising tide of hatred.”

The letter writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree and a Harvard MBA. He started out at the bottom at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company on the side and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation's oldest and most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

A hands-on dynamo, Perkins immersed himself in the science and technology of the companies in his portfolio. He even accompanied them on sales calls. He poured his heart and soul into the business of business. Perkins achieved great wealth for himself, his partners and his clients — and the world is a better place for it. Because Perkins dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked him and dismissed his message. His former colleagues at the venture capital firm he founded threw him under the bus. Left-wing journalists immediately branded him “nuts” and a “rich idiot.”

Please note: Not one of those sanctimonious grievance-mongers had anything to say about the riots and fires set by the Occupy mobs at banks, car dealerships and restaurants in Oakland that provoked Perkins' comparison in the first place.

While he regrets invoking Kristallnacht specifically, Perkins unequivocally refused to back down from his message defending the “creative 1 percent.” He reiterated his fundamental point in a TV interview: “Anytime the majority starts to demonize a minority, no matter what it is, it's wrong. And dangerous. And no good ever comes from it.”

Perkins also chastised those who bemoan “income inequality,” including his erstwhile “friends” Al Gore, Jerry Brown and Barack Obama: “The 1 percent are not causing the inequality. They are the job creators. ... I think Kleiner Perkins itself over the years has created pretty close to a million jobs, and we're still doing it. It's absurd to demonize the rich for being rich and for doing what the rich do, which is get richer by creating opportunity for others.”

Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime. Anti-capitalism saboteurs have organized wealth-shaming protests at corporate CEOs' private homes in New York and in private neighborhoods in Connecticut.

But the most dangerous threats come from the men in power in Washington, who stoke bottomless hatred against “millionaires and billionaires” through class-bashing rhetoric and entrepreneur-crushing policies — while they pocket the hard-earned money of the achievers trying to buy immunity. It's high time to shame the wealth-shamers and their enablers. Silence is complicity.

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies” (Regnery 2009).

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