Bill Perkins, 39, made enough money trading energy derivatives to start a private equity and venture capital firm in Houston.
Now this battle-tested capitalist is fighting communists.
Perkins plopped down $130,000 of his profits from trading Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stock and took out a full-page ad in Tuesday’s New York Times that depicted President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke as “new communists.”
The cartoon depicts our three great revolutionaries as Iwo Jima heroes, only they are driving a hammer-and-sickle flag into the ground. It’s all in the name of saving Wall Street banks, big insurance, Detroit auto and anybody else in line for a multibillion-dollar taxpayer bailout.
“That’s my vision of what a communist society is about,” Perkins said. “Everybody pays for the benefit of the few.”
Paulson, Bernanke and Bush continually promised us our banking system was safe. Now, they’ve told Congress that it has just one week to hand over $700 billion or the entire financial world as we know it will evaporate.
There is hardly time for the rising chorus of angry voices to be heard.
“It’s shocking,” said Perkins, who plans to take out another $130,000 ad this week to carry on his protest. “It’s like somebody coming out of the closet . . . and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m a socialist. I believe in these communist principles.’
“There has to be old-timers in the CIA saying, ‘Didn’t we fight a Cold War against these guys? . . . Why are they showing up in the West Wing of the White House?'”
“This is trickle-down communism,” Perkins said. “And the loser is every single taxpayer and the value of the dollar.”
And you thought it would be pot-smoking hippies, Hollywood, global-warming wonks, secular humanists or maybe just those well-meaning but nutty liberals who would turn us all into Reds.
Perkins is the founder of Small Ventures USA. When he makes an investment or a trade, he reaps the profits or eats the losses.
He worries what it will be like when hard-working entrepreneurs have to compete against Uncle Sam or some “too-big-to-fail” institution held together with government “bailing” wire.
“There used to be these things called recessions,” he said, “and they were good. Bad companies died out. Stronger ones came in.”
Instead of enduring a much nastier downturn from the 2001 Internet bust, we created what President Bush called an “Ownership Society.”
“It was not for cheap housing,” Perkins said. “It was to keep housing prices high. It was an inflation scheme.”
And it kept the good times rolling.
“Those were fun years,” Perkins said. “People traveled around, bought a lot of plastic things from China and had a great time. But now the bill is due, and here we are trying to come up with another scheme not to pay the bill.
“Politicians just don’t want to have a recession,” he said. “They are running scared.
“We don’t want to suffer a lower standard of living, so we are going to buy our way out of it with debt, amortize it, and stick it on our children,” said Perkins, who does not want to do this to his own kids.
After the Internet bubble, the housing bubble and the government-debt bubble, there may not be another bubble left to blow.
“It’s a Ponzi scheme,” Perkins said, “and it won’t work.”
Many point to the bailouts of Chrysler and the S&L industry as examples of how new bailouts can succeed. But those bailouts were followed by the coming of age of the massive Baby Boom generation and technological progress not seen since the Industrial Revolution.
“Past performance is no guarantee of future success,” Perkins said. “And it doesn’t matter if it worked out in the past. It was wrong.
“Freedom is not free,” he said, “and it’s not just the soldiers who pay the price for it. It’s every American citizen. We have to give up a little bit of our economic security . . . to ensure our freedom.
“One of the greatest freedoms we have is the freedom to fail,” Perkins said. “Let it all unwind. Blow up the world. Let’s start over.
“It’s only money.”
Al Lewis: 201-938-5266 or al.lewis@dowjones.com
