Happy Birthday to Warren Buffett's Daddy
Born on this day in Omaha, Nebraska on 1903, Buffett came from a family of prominent grocers. As president of the Buffett-Falk & Company founded in 1931, he prospered through shrewd investing in the stock market.
Running on a pledge to fight those who would “fasten the chains of servitude around America’s neck,“ he served in Congress as a Republican from 1942 to 1948 and 1950 to 1952. As Bill Kauffman writes:
“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….
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.”
Foreign aid was a Buffett bugaboo. The story is told that as the family drove past the British Embassy late one night, Howard, seeing the lights still on, quipped, “They even stay up late to think of ways to get our money.”
Buffett summed up his views of America and the world in a speech on the House floor condemning the Truman Doctrine: “Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by tyranny and coercion at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns. Persuasion and example are the methods taught by the Carpenter of Nazareth, and if we believe in Christianity we should try to advance our ideals by his methods. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics.”….
Congressman Buffett’s son, while revering Pop as a tower of integrity and honesty, seems not to have inherited the old man’s libertarian streak. Warren Buffett is a liberal Democrat whose favorite political causes are legalized abortion and population control.
But surely the father bequeathed the son a confident contrariety, for if Warren Buffett lacks Howard Buffett’s politics, he shares his disdain for the eastern citadels of commerce and power, choosing to live in his hometown of Omaha: a radically decentralist act of which Rep. Buffett would have heartily approved.
After losing a primary for the U.S. Senate, Buffett retired. He became a well-known figure among the small besieged libertarian “remnant” during the Cold War era. His most notable legacy from this standpoint was a founder of The Institute for Humane Studies. He died in 1964.
He marked himself an oddball by returning a pay raise to the Treasury and by subjecting each piece of legislation to a simple test: