The Only Trillionaire
Scanning my Facebook page on any given day, I can't miss how much left-wing Democrats and Socialists complain about billionaire business-people. Citing their power and influence, they treat the wealthy as hardly less than enemies of the people, stunting the poor and enslaving the workers. Conservative-Republicans, on the other hand, wish that more entrepreneurs could achieve great wealth and add a thousand more billionaires!
Leftists complain about the 735 billionaires in this country; but what about the government's size? The only trillionaire in the U.S. is the government. Don't leftists believe it has grown too large for comfort, too complex to work efficiently or responsibly? Don't they think the government has too much power and influence? What on earth makes the Left believe that giving more power to the government—relative to private wealth and power—is better for the country. Can't the government use that power against its citizens?
The Left wants the government to rein in and essentially cancel the billionaires. What's to stop it from reining in or cancelling everyone else? The Left uses the government as a sort of substitute deity, wrestling equality and common ownership out of a repressive private oligarchy, enforcing the Ten Comandments, or whatever.
I just believe that people are people, whether they act in a private capacity or in a public one. The only force in a society that really protects the average citizen is a Constitution—a legal system that protects the nation's freedoms. The judiciary acts as caretaker and definer for the Constitution, so that it limits Congressional watchdog power over the citizenry, even if it claims to act on behalf of the citizenry.
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To understand better the Republican concern about the governmental trillionnaire, my reader should sample J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I suggest alternatively the Lord of the Rings film from 1978, even though the animated film shows fairly graphic violence. By the end of 2024, most of us will have had enough of Lord of the Ring movies, since Hollywood has released so many of them since 2000.
The Amazon Corporation has presented a Ring mini-series. Warner Brothers Corporation plans to release another series of Ring films, which will lead to diminishing returns for every successive film. I just hope that, before people stop going to see them, they will catch on to Tolkien's motives for writing Lord of the Rings.
The "Lord" in the title of the book is the evil "Sauron". He has fashioned beautiful "Rings of Power" to seduce men. The men think they gain power when they put on the Rings, while Sauron insidiously undermines their characters and causes them to transition into "Ringwraiths", to act at his command.
The wizard "Gandalf" has turned over the most important "Ring of Power", the "One Ring", to a Hobbit named Frodo; but the Ringwraiths want it.
So, a ragtag coalition of men, dwarves, elves, and Hobbits protect Frodo. One of the men, Boromir, figures that he can save everyone a lot of time and trouble if he wears the One Ring. He can use the power of the Ring to take out the bad guys himself, but Frodo can see what Boromir cannot, that the power of the One Ring tempts him into corruption; so Frodo refuses to let him wear it.
Scholars have suggested that the idea of the One Ring came to Tolkien from Plato's parable of the "Ring of Gyges" in his book The Republic. In its article on the Ring of Gyges, Wikipedia raises the question, "whether a rational, intelligent person who has no need to fear negative consequences for committing an injustice would nevertheless act justly."
Really, no nation worth its salt can take that chance. You shouldn't entrust a single person to handle a whole lot of power; and the U.S. Presidency, which handles way too much power already. One journalist called the Presidency "the greatest power trip on Earth." That's the reason the United States should govern as a "republic," governed by a body of laws, not a body of men. At least, the Republicans should believe that.
