There Can Be Only One

 As a young man, I became aware of the activities of a wealthy American businessman named Armand Hammer.  Now, Hammer was what later was called a "red diaper baby" in that his parents we Communists and he followed in their footsteps. I did not know at the time any of this, but wondered why a Communists who made a pile of money did not, as Communist theory seemed to predict, give it all away? I had written a paper on Marx's Communist Manifesto, where Marx had predicted that under Communism, all material things would be shared "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Such a lovely sentiment, if totally against human nature. Armand Hammer was the first Communist plutocrat I was aware of, and he definitely did not fit the mold of the Communist Manifesto.

I was reminded of all this as I read Steve McCann's The Fate of American Plutocrats at the American Thinker today. I still wonder why people, who use capitalistic methods to become personally as wealthy as Midas, seem to gravitate toward Marxism? Marxism is the very antithesis of what has animated these peoples' lives. What would I do with such wealth? I might fund a hospital, or put money into cancer research, or fund a school of Lutheran theology such that it doesn't have to take government money. I don't know, but funding Democrat politics, or Republican politics for that matter, sure ain't it.

McCann writes:

In what can only be described as the most astonishing turn of events in American political history, the Democrat party over the past twenty years has evolved into a previously unimagined alliance of super-rich plutocrats and their two-century-old mortal enemy, the far-left or Marxists.

Many years ago, while participating in a voter registration drive, I came upon a grizzled and disheveled old man sitting in the overgrown and weed-infested yard of his paint-starved house calmly smoking his pipe. Despite his gruff demeanor, Ully (Ulysses) was very pleasant and loquacious as we talked for over an hour on topics ranging from the weather to the innate foibles of mankind.

It turned out that he had to leave school after the third grade to work in the fields to help support his family and had toiled in various menial and labor-intensive jobs ever since. Yet, he had a deep and thorough insight into human nature. Among his comments about the rich and ostensibly well-educated was: “All the money in the world cain’t buy a fool a lick of common sense.”

Could it be as simple as that? That the plutocrats just don't have any common sense? McCann makes it plain enough that sooner or later, either the plutocrats will have to destroy the Marxists or the Marxists will destroy the plutocrats. A reading of history suggests the latter. I am reminded of the 1986 film The Highlander where "there can be only one." But you be the judge. Go read McCann's piece, and you tell me.