PayPal/Facebook Money Guy Peter Thiel, between two plinths

Is this what happens when you have too much money? Over at the National Review, PayPal founder/FaceBook funder Peter Thiel offers a major think piece, which starts off with a quotation from the Book of Revelations and goes on to talk about plinths. We already know, from Dave and Charlie Koch, that right-wing libertarian billionaires can talk like hysterical, coupon-clipping* dowagers when a “very, very extreme” President, one who has “internalized some Marxist models,” can threaten to raise their taxes back to those well-nigh unendurable Clinton-era levels. We sure don’t want to go back to those days, do we? Now Thiel teaches us that a gay† libertarian billionaire can get pissed because he’s afraid the 21st Century’s toys won’t be as cool as the ones from the last millennium.

Yeah, to hear Pete tell it, all the cool shit’s been invented, or if it hasn’t been, it won’t be, because we just don’t have the moxie that they had back in the old days. Somehow, this libertarian is dreaming of the good old days when FDR was in the White House. Here’s how it went down, as Thiel imagines it: Einstein writes a letter; Frank reads it; Bang! Atomic bomb! But today? “Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mail room, and the Manhattan Project would not even get started; it certainly could never be completed in three years.”

Well, in fact, Einstein didn’t just drop his letter in the mail. It was hand-delivered by economist Alexander Sachs. And the Manhattan Project happened because three-quarters of the greatest physicists in the world spent three years out in the desert working 24/7 on a single project because they felt that Western Civilization might be destroyed if they didn’t get the job done. I for one don’t wish that we had Adolf Hitler to motivate us.

Afterwords
When you think of the amazing developments that have taken place in biology, geology, astronomy, etc. since WWII, it’s very hard to miss the old days at all. At least, I don’t. But for some reason Pete is demanding shiny hardware instead of, you know, knowledge.