Review
peter s. goodman
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
are of little mind to share their rightful winnings with
anyone else — especially not with losers who failed to
erect their own fortunes, or government bureaucrats sustained by taxing other people’s loot.
Freeland seems a tad infatuated with these supposedly
swashbuckling capitalists. She celebrates the Russian and
Chinese oligarchs whose commercial empires were hived
off from the old Communist state sector in a process that
looked more like looting than
free enterprise. She devotes
similar treatment to Carlos
Slim, the Mexican magnate
FREELAND SEEMS
who manipulated the privaA TAD INFATUATED
tization of the national teleWITH THESE
communications infrastrucSUPPOSEDLY
ture to yield his own lucrative
SWASHBUCKLING
chokehold over the market—
CAPITALISTS.
one that has kept prices extraordinarily high, to the detriment of small business.
“Even today’s rent-seeking
plutocrats work for a living,” she writes. “Carlos Slim or
the Russian oligarchs owe their fortunes to rents they
captured themselves, not to estates conquered by distant
ancestors.” She adds: “The bulk of their wealth is generally the fruit of hustle, intelligence, and a lot of luck.
They are not aristocrats, by and large, but rather economic meritocrats, preoccupied not only with consuming
wealth but also with creating it.”
Freeland is a bit too inclined to accept at face value
the assertions of the fabulously rich, apparently confident in her ability to sort out speech served up in the
service of commercial interest from genuine sentiment.
In discussing the philanthropic efforts of billionaires, for
example, she tells us that the Koch brothers — famous