"A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing"

Anyone that has read these pieces for a while knows where I stand on Warren Buffett.  Namely I can’t stand him.  It has nothing to do with the fact that he has so much money.  I am not an envious person and moreover I think having wealth anywhere near his is more of a curse than a blessing.  The reason I can’t stand him is because he is a fraud.  While he may have been a great investor at one point, he is more of a great actor than anything else.  Here is one of the richest people in the world.  He sits there in Nebraska, chuckling, drinking his cherry coke and eating hamburgers in this pathetically obvious attempt to convince the masses he is “just like us.”  The term wolf in sheep’s was invented for guys like this.  Like most people out there I don’t like bad guys.  The trick; however, is that the most dangerous bad guys don’t come out and tell you they are bad guys and how they are going to fleece you.  What they do is pretend they are the good guys.  Pretend that they are on the side of the little guy or working for the “collective good,” which is a preposterous statement because there is no such thing.  Human desires and notions of what is a good life are as varied as the stars in the sky.  Once we start allowing officials or rich people to define “collective good” you can be sure we are finished.

I am currently rereading Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.  Thoreau has been described as “an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist.”  In other words, in my mind a true American hero.  I was struck by this line as I was reading it the other day:

If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me – some of its virus mingled with my blood.  No – in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.  A man is not a good man to me because he will feed me if I should be starving, or warm me if I should be freezing, or pull me out of a ditch if I should ever fall into one.  I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much. 

Thank you sir.

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