Text extracted via OCR from the original document. May contain errors from the scanning process.
I see that every day. I’m a very practical, pragmatic capitalist. I was trained at Goldman
Sachs, I went to Harvard Business School, I was as hard-nosed a capitalist as you get. I
specialized in media, in investing in media companies, and it’s a very, very tough
environment. And you've had a fairly good track record. So I don’t want this to kinda
sound namby-pamby, “Let’s all hold hands and sing ‘Kumbaya’ around capitalism.”
But there’s a strand of capitalism today — two strands of it, that are very disturbing.
One is state-sponsored capitalism. And that’s the capitalism you see in China and Russia.
I believe it’s what Holy Father [Pope Francis] has seen for most of his life in places like
Argentina, where you have this kind of crony capitalism of people that are involved with
these military powers-that-be in the government, and it forms a brutal form of capitalism
that is really about creating wealth and creating value for a very small subset of people.
And it doesn’t spread the tremendous value creation throughout broader distribution
patterns that were seen really in the 20th century.
The second form of capitalism that I feel is almost as disturbing, is what I call the Ayn
Rand or the Objectivist School of libertarian capitalism. And, look, I’m a big believer in a
lot of libertarianism. I have many many friends that’s a very big part of the conservative
movement — whether it’s the UKIP movement in England, it’s many of the underpinnings
of the populist movement in Europe, and particularly in the United States.
However, that form of capitalism is quite different when you really look at it to what I call
the “enlightened capitalism” of the Judeo-Christian West. It is a capitalism that really
looks to make people commodities, and to objectify people, and to use them almost — as
many of the precepts of Marx — and that is a form of capitalism, particularly to a younger
generation [that] they’re really finding quite attractive. And if they don’t see another
alternative, it’s going to be an alternative that they gravitate to under this kind of rubric of
“personal freedom.”
“Look at what’s happening in ISIS ... look at
the sophistication of which they’ve taken the
tools of capitalism ... at what they’ve done
with Twitter and Facebook.”
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029066