By Selwyn Duke
The American Thinker
December 13, 2009
People such as George Soros and Michael Moore certainly talk a good game, but the next Mother Teresa they are not. Mother Teresa never criticized the free-market system; wealth just wasn’t for her. Soros and Moore are quite the opposite. They will never take a vow of poverty and dedicate themselves to helping the poor. They just want our civilization to take a vow of poverty and become poor.
This has caused many to wonder: How can someone preach socialism while being the most rapacious “capitalist” imaginable? Well, I have a theory about this.
It has often been observed that those who preach liberalism the most practice charity the least, and research bears this out. For example, in a piece titled “Bleeding Heart Tightwads,” self-proclaimed liberal Nicholas Kristof wrote,
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, ‘Who Really Cares,’ cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.…
…Now, let’s talk about that seemingly greedy man, George Soros. As a 14-year-old Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied Budapest, Hungary in 1944, he posed as the godson of a government official who had been bribed to protect him. Soros then accompanied his protector while the man would make his rounds confiscating property from Jews who were being shipped off to death camps. During a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft, Soros said he felt no guilt over this and explained why, stating, “Well, of course I c — I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn’t be there, because that was — well, actually, in a funny way, it’s just like in markets — that if I weren’t there — of course, I wasn’t doing it, but somebody else would.”
It’s just like in markets…that’s an interesting comment. But what is this similarity of which Soros speaks? Is it just that by his lights, in both situations he had to choose between being the predator and the prey? Well, read two more statements Soros made in the interview. When asked about his mercenary currency trading, he said, “I don’t feel guilty. Because I’m engaged in an amoral activity which is not meant to have anything to do with guilt.”
An amoral activity or an amoral man?
And when asked whether he deserved the blame for various nations’ financial collapses, he replied, “I am basically there to — to make money. I cannot and do not look at the social consequences of — of what I do.”
No, but he sure looked at the social consequences of what George Bush (whom he called a Nazi in his book) did. But I digress.
It’s clear that Soros sees our free-market system as an evil, much like the Nazi system whose death camps he eluded. And I wouldn’t be surprised if, just as when he was 14, Soros sees himself as a victim caught in its web (the difference is that in 1944, he actually was a victim, whereas now he is the spider)…
The article continues at The American Thinker.
