Is Sergey Brin Out to Destroy America?

I was recently getting a physical and a Russian-speaking technician doing my EKG told me that he was related to the richest Russian. Naturally, I assumed he meant Vladimir Putin.
 
“No, of course not,” he replied. “I meant Sergey Brin.”
 
Why Brin catches my attention
 
Both Brin and I immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as young kids. Brin was just six years old. But he has been infinitely more successful than me – especially in the terms in which success is typically measured in the United States, i.e., money.
 
Along with Larry Page, a co-founder of Google back in 1998, Brin’s net worth is estimated at around $250 billion.  That makes him one of the richest people in the world — perhaps even as rich as Putin.
 
The monetary lure of turning into a Trumpist
 
Early on, in line with many other Silicon Valley potentates, Brin was a supporter of various liberal and democratic causes.  Recently, however, he has turned full MAGA and has become a Trumpist.
 
These days, Sergey Brin has been in the news quite a bit. He has emerged as a major opponent of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 5% wealth tax and has so far spent nearly $57 million of his own money to fight it.
 
Channeling his inner Ayn Rand
 
“I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place,” he was quoted in the New York Times.
 
The most charitable interpretation of this remark is that Brin feels close to the mindset of another Soviet era refugee to the United States, the author Ayn Rand.
 
That affiliation aside, there is a lot to unpack here.  This begins with the preposterous inference that Newsom will be somehow running a Gulag and herding California almond growers into collective farms.
 
Brin, who has enough money to give $6,000 to every man, woman and child living in California, is in a lather because he might have to fork over a tiny portion of his wealth to share with others.

More imbalanced than even in the Gilded Age era
 
Clearly, along with fellow immigrant billionaires such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, Brin is now not only fully assimilated into America’s business and political elites.

He has also become infected with their unrestrained ideology of utter greed at a time when the domestic income distribution is more imbalanced than even in the Gilded Age era 150 years ago.
 
Indeed, billionaires in California whining about a wealth tax are as much to be pitied as billionaires in New York beating their chests over a proposed tax on non-residents’ apartments valued at over $5 million.
 
Both are manifestations of the same boundless greed by people who have fortunes large enough to keep several generations of their descendants in the richest 1 percent.
 
Plus the epidemic of mind-boggling corruption
 
The epidemic of greed is further aggravated by the mind-boggling corruption and grifting by U.S. President Donald Trump, his family members and friends and his political appointees.
 
Trump’s insiders blatantly play the financial markets using insider information – enough to arouse suspicions that the war in Iran has been waged specifically to rig the stock market.
 
Most of this is illegal and even unconstitutional, but it may ultimately call for court-ordered psychiatric treatment rather than jail sentences.
 
Throwing any caution to the winds
 
Sergey Brin and his family came to the United States as refugees with no money. I know that because I am acquainted with his parents.
 
But he was able to take advantage of the opportunities the United States used to offer at the time. He got his college degree from the University of Maryland where his father had a teaching position, and he attended a graduate program at elite Stanford University on a fellowship provided to him by the National Science Foundation.
 
Greed as a political form of mental illness
 
The America he immigrated to allowed him to achieve his dream. But the mental illness of greed has turned him into a Trumpist.
 
He now, rather perversely given his own biography, supports an administration that has closed the country to refugees, unleashed a campaign of hatred against foreigners and is expelling hard-working immigrants who are hoping to achieve their dreams.
 
He is also supporting an administration that is gutting America’s scientific establishment, including the very National Science Foundation that paid for Sergey Brin’s Master’s Degree from Stanford.
 
Is the U.S. on the road to another Soviet Union?
 
Brin is warning us that a 5% tax on his wealth will turn California into a latter-day Soviet Union. However, another analogy from his and my old country would perhaps be more relevant.
 
Under the Czars, the Russian Empire featured massive inequality. A small elite owned all assets and was drowning in wealth.  Meanwhile, industrial workers earned starvation wages and over 60% of the population, mostly poor peasants, were illiterate.
 
The 1917 Bolshevik takeover may have been led by a small group of bloody-minded thugs around Vladimir Lenin, but they were brought to power by a legitimate wave of hatred of the elites.
 
The Russian revolution thus turned into a bloodbath of landowners and of the bourgeoisie who, at a minimum, saw their property confiscated.
 
Preserve one’s wealth – or be hell-bent on further maximizing it?
 
The U.S. economic, financial and political system has been remarkably good for the superrich. They not only own an overwhelming share of America’s wealth, control the country’s economic life and influence its culture, the arts and science, but are allowed to buy politicians and set America’s policy.
 
They are undoubtedly the greatest beneficiaries of America’s social, economic and political system.  For that same reason, they should naturally have the highest stake in preserving it.
 
Greed-induced insanity
 
It is therefore a diagnosis of their greed-induced insanity that all they seem to be interested in is not paying taxes.
 
They want to starve the government of the money it needs to support the safety net, to build and maintain infrastructure, to fund health care and education.
 
It is one thing that they obviously don’t seem to care whether their fellow Americans can have civilized life and provide opportunities to their kids. By not paying their fair share of taxes so far, the rich are hollowing out the government while at the same time pushing it deeper and deeper into debt.
 
It is quite another matter for the greed-induced anti-tax mentality pushing people like Brin to support Trump.
 
Conclusion
 
Sergey Brin is right. The Russian experience is relevant for today’s America, but in quite another way from that which he worries about.
 
The real lesson from 1917 Russia, the Bolshevik revolution and the ensuing civil war is that ever more income inequality can put a people over the brink.  Sergey Brin, of all people, should know how this story ended.
 
Alas, he has shown no ability to reflect with any iota of conscience on the ethical implications of his made-in-the-USA riches.