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Meet Warren Buffett’s Daddy (Bill Kauffman, July/August 2003, The American Enterprise)

Warren Buffett, the legendary investor whose taste for hamburgers and life in Omaha, Nebraska gives him a reputation for Middle American eccentricity in the world of high finance, is just another colorless gray-pinstriper when compared with his father: Rep. Howard Buffett (R-NE), who half a century ago was perhaps the most radical and principled Republican member of Congress.

The Buffetts were pillars of Omaha. Howard Buffett was a stockbroker, "gentle and sweet-natured," in the words of Warren's biographer Roger Lowenstein. His politics, though, were to "the right of God," cracked one local banker.

Buffett was elected to Congress in 1942 with a pledge to keep FDR from "fasten [ing] the chains of political servitude around America's neck." He marked himself an oddball by returning a pay raise to the Treasury and by subjecting each piece of legislation to a simple test: "Will this add to, or subtract from, human liberty?"

Very few House bills passed Howard Buffett's test.

In four non-consecutive terms representing Omaha in the U.S. House of Representatives, the radical backbench Republican compiled an almost purely libertarian record. He opposed whatever New Deal alphabet-soup agencies and Fair Deal bureaucracies emerged from the black lagoon of the Potomac. As the historian Joseph Stromberg has written, "the only [current] member of Congress who bears comparison with Buffett is Ron Paul," the Texas Republican and courageous naysayer.

Buffett was also a strict isolationist, denouncing NATO, conscription, the Marshall Plan ("Operation Rathole"), and the incipient Cold War, which he believed would enchain Americans in "the shackles of regimentation and coercion...in the name of stopping communism."

It is men like Howard Buffett who make nonsense of the charge that conservatism is reactionary. The conservatives are always there trying to stop this stuff before it happens, but aren't listened to until the mess is made. It's only because their superior vision is ignored at the time that they later end up having to roll back liberalism and seem to be merely reacting.

Too bad the senior Mr. Buffett isn't around to spank his son. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 23, 2003 8:06 AM