The benefits of class warfare

Jerry Della Femina, the "Mad Men" Ad Man, Has Shrugged

Jerry Della Femina, the legendary advertizing visionary, restaurant owner, and alleged inspiration for the popular AMC television show,Mad Men, has shrugged. As he wrote recently in The Independent (East Hampton), in 2008 he “decided that this country was falling in love with an attractive, great-speechmaking hustler/socialist”, and due to the country’s further lurch towards statism, Della Femina has decided to drop out on the way to selling “my houses, my advertizing business, my newspaper and my restaurant.”

Ayn Rand purists will say Della Femina hasn’t exactly shrugged in theAtlas Shrugged sense given his plans to sell his holdings. In Rand’s essential novel, the heroic individuals of commerce simply disappeared, leaving their assets to worthless looters lacking business skills. But that’s nitpicking, and only in fiction would the productive give up all that’s rightfully theirs.

Della Femina has by any rational measure shrugged, and his decision to do so tells us what happens when society’s achievers are fleeced so that the activities of the failed and indolent can be subsidized. Some, as Della Femina plans to do, depart, and we’re all worse off as a result.

Though Della Femina has not said he’s leaving the U.S. altogether, it’s as though he is. This is one of the problems with excessive taxation on the successful.

Whereas light taxation ensures that the greatest number of achievers will participate in the marketplace with the greatest frequency, high levels of taxation mean that some, on the margin, disappear. Individuals with substantial wealth like Della Femina can continue to live in luxury, and they can do so without taking part in the economic activity that moves society forward.

So with Della Femina checking out due to an overbearing, greedy government, those who might want to work for a proven winner will no longer have that opportunity. For those eager to transact with a proven restaurant operator, that option is now closed. And for the companies interested in accessing Della Femina’s Midas touch when it comes to branding the products of others, he’s moving on.

In short, taxes on the rich as my Forbes colleague Charles Kadlec likes to point out, are nothing more than tariffs placed on the rest of us that make it more difficult to have dealings with outsized successes like Della Femina. Della Femina’s departure is all of our loss.

As Della Femina put it, “I’m just not ready to have my wealth redistributed. I’m not ready to pay more tax money than the next guy because I provide jobs and because I work a 60-hour week and I earn more than $250,000 a year.” Traditional commentators would say that Della Femina is greedy, but what is greedy about providing for one’s own needs? Isn’t true greed producing nothing under the expectation that the productive will give us the fruits of their labor so that we don’t have to work hard ourselves? Is it not both criminal and greedy to use the force of government to spend the hard-earned money of others?

Lest we forget, no one was forced at gunpoint into Della Femina’s eponymous restaurant, and similarly it wasn’t coercion that led Isuzu, Pan Am and Beck’s Beer into his advertizing agencies. Instead, Della Femina worked extraordinarily hard, gave individuals and businesses what they wanted, and for doing so, he grew rich.

Della Femina’s reward? A president who says the rich are merely fortunate, and that they should hand over even more of their money so that the “compassionate” in Washington who’ve mostly never met a payroll, never built a business and never had their productivity measured by the marketplace can hand over their earnings to others. Some would call this theft, and that’s probably not a harsh enough description.

Of course Della Femina’s unfortunate story doesn’t end there. A man of means, he no longer trusts the direction of the United States, nor the dollar that we use to exchange our production. Of the belief that we’re headed for further difficulties, Della Femina is “going into gold and silver.”

To put it simply, we’re not just losing Della Femina’s brilliant work effort. Long on capital, he’s shrugging as an investor too.

With President Obama eager to tax the productive activity of the effective, and with his Treasury aggressively seeking (and succeeding) to devalue the dollar, Della Femina is removing his growth capital from the marketplace and investing it in two sinks of wealth with very limited economic purpose that are most useful as a hedge against the monetary mismanagement of government. Not only are we losing his skills, we’re losing the companies and jobs that in saner times his wealth would help produce.

Class warriors such as President Obama embrace the classic fallacy of loving jobs while hating job creators, and in fostering an environment that penalizes the productive and the investment capital that funds their activities, Obama is unwittingly directing his cruel egalitarianism at those who aren’t as skillful, and who don’t work as hard as Della Femina. Lest we forget, in growing rich Della Femina created a lot of jobs for those lacking his skills, courage and drive, and his investments doubtless created more.

But thanks to a tax, spend and devalue government, grand business successes like Jerry Della Femina are moving on. Copycats are sure to follow, and this bears remembering the next time we lament a lack of well-paid jobs. The penalties laid down on the creators of such things were too much, and they departed, or more appropriately, shrugged.