Our Founding Fathers Must Have Been Paranoid Too, Like Tom Perkins

Liberals are in a feeding frenzy over Silicon Valley venture capitalist, Tom Perkins’s, irate letter to the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, reprinted in the Wall Street Journal (Is a Progressive Kristallnacht Coming?). In his complaint, Perkins calls “attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its ‘one percent,’ namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’” Perkins warns of “a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent…. This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant "progressive" radicalism unthinkable now?

The Left has pounced on Perkins’ Kritstallnacht analogy as the “clownish” mutterings of an “aging, coddled jerk,” who has the gall to compare American “progressives” to Hitler’s Nazis! They dismiss Perkins’ fear of dangerous demonization of the one percent as the paranoid ravings of an ultra-rich guy, who like most of his kind, is “alarmingly detached from reality” (Paul Krugman Paranoia of the Plutocrats).

The faux empathetic conclusion of the Left: Pay no attention to the ramblings of this poor (but rich) fool. He cannot help himself. Imagine a rich guy, isolated in his Francisco estate and private clubs, worrying that “they are coming to get me.”

I say: Not so fast. Perkins’ fears are actually those that motivated our founding fathers to establish a limited government, secured by checks and balances and by the Bill of Rights. Our founders worried, like Perkins, that a majority can pass laws that discriminate against minorities—in particular against owners of property for the purpose of “more fairly” distributing wealth. 

go to forbes.com