My new piece at the homepage re-introduces you to Peter Schiff, the increasingly successful and influential libertarian investor/investment broker, his star only a little dimmed by a failed 2010 U.S. Senate bid. (It’s no small feat to score 23 percent of the vote on your first bid for office, in a three-way race.) Schiff gave the most chest-pounding case I’ve yet heard for Mitt Romney to laugh off Democrats’ attacks on his wealth.
Democrats “want to play on people’s envy and greed,” he says. “Here’s a rich guy—he’s got money in Switzerland. Oooooh! He doesn’t have some patriotic obligation to send money to Washington, so they can waste it. I applaud people for trying to limit their tax bills. Is [Romney] betting against the dollar? Well, it’s a smart bet. If I were him I’d say, ‘Of course I’m betting against the dollar. I want to change the policy, so I don’t have to bet against it.’ ”Why hang out with Schiff, apart from a general desire to spend time with interesting people? Because the writ against Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed group that brought him to D.C. this time, is that it brainwashes activists into wanting to do good for oil companies. Not fair – their discontent and fear about the government, and the dollar, runs much deeper. Schiff taps into it deeper than a BP drilling deck.
