The State of the Job Creator is under siege.
Last week, a prominent self-made tech mogul dared to diagnose the problem publicly. His 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 mini-manifesto was newsworthy because this truth-teller is not a GOP politician or conservative activist or Fox News personality. As he points out, he lives in the “epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco.” No matter. The mob is shooting the messenger anyway. But maybe, just maybe, his critical message in defense of our nation’s achievers will transcend, inspire, embolden and prevail.
The letter-writer is Tom Perkins, a Silicon Valley pioneer with an MIT degree in electrical engineering and computer science and a Harvard MBA. He started out at Hewlett-Packard, founded his own separate laser company and then teamed up with fellow entrepreneur Eugene Kleiner to establish one of the nation’s most important venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.
Because he dared to compare the seething resentment of modern progressives to Kristallnacht and Nazi Germany, the grievance industry attacked Perkins 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 refused to back down from 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.”
Amen, amen and amen. Perkins barely scratched the surface of the War on Wealth that has spread under the Obama regime.
Worst of all are 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 cowed enablers. Silence is complicity.
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