While Properly Resisting Putin’s Villainy, Let’s Not Allow Governments To Take Property

Quick question: how many people have you met over the last 10, 20 or 30 years who said they were moving to Buffalo, NY, Flint, MI, or Pueblo, CO for a new job. Tick tock, tick tock….

The question is meant to illuminate a simple truth about where people tend to migrate for work. Rarely do they move to where the rich generally aren’t. Conversely, it’s the norm for them to move to where millionaires and billionaires are abundant. Why? The economic opportunity is generally much greater where the rich are.

Looked at globally, the world’s poor, unwashed masses have been risking it all to reach the United States for centuries. The very wealth unequal United States. Why? The question was answered in the previous paragraph. Simply stated, the United States is a massively inconvenient truth for the emotional puddles in our midst who claim the rich harm the poor by being rich. Where humans take their talents is the purest market signal of all.

All of this and more came to mind reading recaps of President Biden’s State of the Union speech. Among other things, he said that “We are joining with our European allies to find and seize your yachts, your luxury apartments, your private jets.” Translated for those who need it, Task Force KleptoCapture aims to confiscate the property of Russian businessmen who’ve thrived during Vladimir Putin’s time in control of Russia.

Where’s the outrage? Why is it that our federal government is always the growing, wealth-taking victor every time something goes wrong here, or elsewhere in the world. And the tyrant in Putin has done wrong.

About what’s been written so far, it should be made clear that there’s no sympathy for Putin or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The invasion brings new meaning to primitive. Really, what serious leader nowadays pursues invasion as a growth or empire building strategy? What’s the point? Leaving aside lives lost, families broken, and wealth destroyed, there’s quite simply no need to invade in a world increasingly defined by economic interconnectedness. In other words, when trade is free there’s no need to take wealth and land when exchange of wealth among productive peoples lifts the economic fortunes of everyone wise enough to divide up work. Animals take, while rational people advance themselves by working alongside other people. Putin’s decision to destroy wealth in order to gain it speaks to a nauseating blast to an ugly past.

Still, Putin being wrong in no way justifies Biden’s joining hands with other governments to confiscate property. How barbaric of the U.S. Civilized people don’t take the property of others. Worse, the blowback from such a move could be haunting for America’s prosperous. Think about it.

While Putin is rightly viewed by some as a war criminal for his needless invasion of Ukraine, couldn’t the world’s leaders draw a similar conclusion about President Biden’s decision to exit Afghanistan in such careless fashion? By most accounts Afghanistan is in the midst of a tragic implosion that includes the vast majority of its population rushing toward abject poverty.

Russian oligarchs suddenly face property confiscation based on their ties to Putin, at which point couldn’t leaders of nations less respectful of property than the U.S. do as we’re doing and take the possessions (including foreign business holdings) of American businessmen known to be close to Biden? Would Americans look fondly on the dispossession of the U.S.’s most enterprising individuals and companies by foreign governments? Judging by where Americans migrate, the question seemingly answers itself. Does anyone think the U.S. stock markets wouldn’t be correcting much more brutally in response to such a scenario?

To which some will say that the Russian oligarchs didn’t earn their wealth honestly; that it was acquired in crony fashion via ties to Putin. Ok, but amassing great wealth is never easy, particularly in countries like Russia where the fingers of the politically powerful are long. Put another way, in countries like Russia that are limping toward markets, politicians logically exert power over everything. Which means businessmen must curry favor with politicians. Is this ideal? Certainly not. When has government oversight of commerce ever elevated a business?

After which, it’s not as though American businesses don’t feel compelled to make nice with U.S. politicians. Along these lines, as U.S. businesses retreat from Russia to the detriment of the country’s people, is some of the retreat a way to please a U.S. political class immune to the economic implications of its own actions? Much the same, Putin and those close to him will not suffer these actions, but the Russian people who at least in the near term can’t use their credit cards, will.

And while it’s thankfully not like what happens in Russia, there’s a reason every major U.S. business has a rather robust “Washington strategy.” Get it? If you don’t, read up on what happened to Microsoft in the late 1990s when Bill Gates didn’t have a strategy for placating the political class. So while the U.S. is thankfully nothing like Russia, there’s a reason politicians eat and live so well while in office, that their relatives and friends do too, and why they generally earn millions once out of office. Cronyism isn’t just a Russian thing, sadly.

Despite this, Russia’s most enterprising are essentially on the run right now. U.S. politicians who thought nothing of locking down Americans and taking away their right to live and work in 2020 have found cause to trample on private property in response the authoritarian ways of Putin. There’s something wrong with this.

There is because a move to drive Russia’s most prosperous into hiding for the sins of a leader they can’t control means that the Russian people who aren’t rich and who aren’t connected stand to suffer the most. If the previous assertion doesn’t ring true, please re-read this opinion piece’s introductory paragraphs. The undeniable truth is that economic opportunity is greatest in locales populated by the rich, and in particular the productive rich.

Russia’s most enterprising are now under attack, and people wonder why the economic outlook for the Russian people is increasingly ugly? The sanctions imposed by Biden et always had symbolic qualities to them, but when property confiscation becomes a strategy, watch out. If anyone doubts this, ask what would happen to capital flows in Silicon Valley if foreign governments were suddenly targeting the global holdings of the region’s leading lights. Progress and the unemployment that springs from progress is driven by the vital few. Russia’s vital few are on the run right now, but the real victims will be those who rely on Russia’s business class for sustenance.

Again, none of what’s been said should be construed as a defense of Putin. Not at all. But it is a defense of the Russian people who really don’t have much of a say in who leads them. They’re now at the mercy of U.S. and world leaders eager to be seen “doing something” in response to Vladimir Putin’s revolting barbarism. Ok, but government “doing something” is almost by definition government acting incompetently.