The Visible Hand
What do you suppose George Soros does after he has urinated but before he leaves a restroom?
Here's a man with so much wealth and power and force of will that he's said to have single-handedly engineered the collapse of currency values in certain foreign markets. In 1969, he began managing what became the most successful investment fund in the history of the universe. These days, he coughs up $500 million a year to spend on such things as, say, improving societies in Africa, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union. He has written more books on capitalism, democracy, and globalization than you will ever have time to read.
Soros dreams up ambitious plans for stuff like, oh, restructuring the world. Last week at Town Hall, for instance, he proposed "an alternative vision of the role that the U.S. should play in the world," having something to do with "world markets" and "global societies," and a lot of things being "open" and with a basis in "legitimacy" because "the pursuit of American supremacy is bound to become unsustainable."
He made sweeping philosophical statements ("There are common human interests that are more important than national interests"), sweeping suggestions for reform ("We have global markets but we don't have global political institutions"), and sweeping arguments for why we should, in spite of the awful, arrogant authority of the Bush administration, use military force in Iraq ("Saddam is a threat to the world and we need to deal with that"). He said, "The main source of poverty and illness in other countries is bad government."
The crowd ate it up, clapped, nodded, cheered, stood up, sat down, called out to him, passed questions to the stage on little cards, elbowed each other, guffawed in the right places--and, in general, wanted to be him. Afterward, one man near me said, "Everything he said was exactly what I was thinking. Exactly."
I don't know the first thing about money markets in Malaysia, but I can assure you that you do not become the financial, philanthropic, philosophic pillar of our times if you don't know the first thing about hygiene. George Soros washes his hands after he pees; two other random men I watched in Town Hall's bathroom--in the space of two minutes--didn't. Middle-aged, normal-looking, loafer-wearing pervs, shuffling out to go spread their penis pathogens all over the palms of others. Two men in two minutes--or, on average, a man a minute. And it was crowded. In the lobby afterward, all the bankers and brokers stood around striking deals, slapping each other on the back, shaking hands.
