The CCP’s Beard
Mark Cuban, NBA owner and infamous stumbler into great fortune, recently gave an interview that should not pass without comment for it exposed with great clarity that many of the very wealthy are feckless, spineless, and simply less than the average human in all ways except their bank accounts. They carry forth in Gucci loafers blithely oblivious that fortune has conspired in their favor to the same degree that fortune conspired against the infant with terminal cancer.
These nouveau-est of riche just don’t get it. For years, billionaire mascot Bill Gates has been loading up planes with cash and flying them from Seattle to Africa, the exhaust of his noblesse oblige wafting down on the people and the nation that enabled his billions.[1] Consider that he could have dropped fifty billion on Detroit and still be one of the wealthiest people in America. Or that he could have endowed every historically black college in the nation so that tuition is $0 and still be one of the wealthiest people in the world. He could have purchased and endowed a dozen inner-city hospitals to offer free healthcare, endowed a few dozen medical schools so doctors would graduate without debt and can opt for lower-paying jobs, rent Disneyland for a week and invite children with terminal diseases … the list of possible goods is as vast as his >$100 billion net worth. Instead, he pollutes the world with inane opinions and polio.
American billionaires PR’d their best, but when we look around our communities, we notice a deafening absence. The Rockefellers endowed U. Chicago and Spelman, Colonial Williamsburg, the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Countless colleges, hospitals, museums and other public buildings were launched with funding from gilded age robber barons. These are the same robber barons who Mark Twain concluded had “rotted the commercial morals of this nation” so that “we have lost our ancient sympathy with oppressed peoples struggling for life and liberty.”
Just Taking Orders
Asked how Mark Cuban and the NBA could conduct business with the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP), Cuban responded “They are a customer” and quickly followed with “I wish I could solve all the world’s problems. I’m sure you do too. But we can’t.”[2]
“They are a customer.” The ol’ Nuremberg defense, just following orders from your bank account. And a hitman could explain that the husband who wanted his wife murdered was just “a customer.” It’s a rhetorically childish maneuver designed to abdicate responsibility that even your dog, after ripping up your pillow, wouldn’t attempt.
“I wish I could solve all the world’s problems….”
First, no one is asking anyone to “solve all the world’s problems.” Both “solve” and “all” are rhetorical lies designed to reframe the question so that Cuban may then respond to a question that no one asked.
Second, the question was whether Cuban and the NBA would do what they can — contribute — to addressing CCP’s Himalayan-sized genocidal mania. The CCP was never elected by its people and has no demonstrated widespread support, and thus operates on a thin veneer of credibility. The context of its credibility is that the CCP delivers vast improvements in living standards to its people. The subtext, of course, is that the CCP will murder anyone who opposes it (as demonstrated by millions of Chinese corpses).
This thin veneer shines when the CCP is viewed as a credible and powerful actor on the global stage. The CCP is hyper-sensitive to and relies very heavily on international recognition. If the NBA — very popular in China — openly refused to do business in China as long as the CCP is in power, then the veneer would dull.
Cuban must know this is true: just observe how the CCP convulsed in infantile spasms when the general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets tweeted his support for pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. A minor disagreement from a minor person caused the CCP to take its ball and go home, thus exposing its remarkable fragility.
Or perhaps someone could tell Mark about the time the Korean boyband BTS said something nice about Korean-American cooperation (going back the Korean war), and the CCP flipped out. That happened all the way back in last week. The band of effeminate boys and their tween apostles stood firm, and the CCP backed off.
A common communist critique of capitalism was that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” To be clear, communists believe they can leverage capitalist greed to destroy capitalist nations and peoples (fyi “capitalist” is code for “democracies” which is code for “consent of the governed”).
Of course, the morally challenged will shrug off the observation as long as it’s not them but millions of Chinese hanging from the gallows. As long as the lives and freedoms of Uyghurs and Tibetans and Hong Kongers and millions of others under the CCP jackboot is viewed as fungible — for money or power — then Mark Cuban is no better than the vampiric CCP functionary sucking the lifeblood out of his own nation to add another piece of silver to his hoard. So Mark, are you up to 30 yet?
And yet if private capital is better allocated than public capital — as the anti-socialist/communist argument goes — then why is this private capital not only ignorant of but seemingly antithetical to the public good? Why must private capital be amoral (or, in Cuban’s case, immoral)? If, as Twain observed, people such as Rockefeller rotted the morals of the West, then Mark Cuban isn’t further rotting Western morals. Cuban is the rot. Seemingly without any agency to connect capital with moral action yet with all the cognitive sophistication of bacteria, Cuban is but an impotent spec in the husk of a once moral nation. China is a customer, and Cuban sells them the weapons of genocide… no, not the blindfolds of enslaved Uyghurs or the surgical gear for their live organ harvesting, but rather the instrument that the CCP so desperately needs to import: credibility.
And yet, none of these words constitute an argument for socialism. Instead, it is Mark Cuban who makes the argument for socialism (or communism) every time he disconnects private capital from moral action and panders to his own bank account.
It’s axiomatic to some that an economic critique of capitalism is congenitally tethered to moral questions; rather, consider whether such questions aren’t economic at all but rather entirely moral — which is to say, cultural. To the shock of economists everywhere (probably), capitalism is not a thing unto itself but rather a cultural expression.
And the purest signal that capitalism needs some introspection is that our billionaires and their corporations — Mark Cuban and the NBA — have less testicular fortitude that an androgynous Korean boy band.
[1] That Gates is destroying Africa is another topic. See: https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/bill-gates-bamboozled-out-of-10b-6c80e4a505ab
[2] Many — moral philosophers, for example — will gladly let you know that “human rights” are political fictions of convenience and not moral imperatives. Human rights only exist as far as those with power conjure them into existence and such modern shamanism only serves the needs of the conjurer. Mark Cuban proves the point that “rights” cannot be dependent on the whim of the powerful.
