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Buffett’s powerful example

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Wealthy people have a new role model: our neighbor to the west and owner of a significant chunk of the Central Iowa economy, Warren Buffett. Oh sure, he was already their role model, but that admiration was too easy. Everybody wants to be like a guy who’s swimming in money. That’s not admiration; that’s vicarious greed.

But now Buffett is making it clear that he thinks there’s more to business, and life, than dying with the most toys. He’s like a general who wins a war, then sticks around to rebuild the enemy’s civilization. It makes the war look less like a towering moment in history and more like the first step in a big project.

When Buffett announced that he plans to give away an incomprehensible sum to the foundation operated by Bill and Melinda Gates, he posed a new challenge to the moneyed class.

He also put a new perspective on business success. Buffett told an interviewer: “In my case, the ability to allocate capital would have had little utility unless I lived in a rich, populous country in which enormous quantities of marketable securities were traded and were sometimes ridiculously mispriced. And fortunately for me, that describes the U.S. in the second half of the last century.”

We all have our skills and we all put in our hours. But few of us could get ahead without the appropriate setting and circumstances. If you did it all on your own, keep every penny. If you made your way as part of a large and complicated society, help make it better for everybody who follows – not just your children.

“I would argue,” Buffett said, “that when your kids have all the advantages anyway, in terms of how they grow up and the opportunities they have for education, including what they learn at home — I would say it’s neither right nor rational to be flooding them with money.”

If the grand plans of Buffett and Gates motivate the wealthy to follow their lead, the world could change for the better.