Best Laid Plans? "One Percenters" May Be Trapped By Their Own Plans

By David Codrea, January 30th 2015
JPFO writer contributor, © 2014.

It’s the kind of headline that fuels ideas for a movie script: “Panicked super rich buying boltholes with private airstrips to escape if poor rise up.” 

“Hedge fund managers are buying up remote ranches and land in places like New Zealand to flee to in event of wide-spread civil unrest,” The Daily Mirror reported. 

“With growing inequality and riots such as those in London in 2011 and in Ferguson and other parts of the USA last year, many financial leaders fear they could become targets for public fury.”

Nick Hanauer

It’s not just hedge fund managers. This column talked about Seattle-based One-Percenter Nick Hanauer, who seems to think he can allay a mob he fears by stumping for a minimum wage increase. That he doesn’t cite who in the federal government has delegated Constitutional authority to mandate that, along with the clause delegating such powers, is hardly surprising. He and his fellow anti-gun “gazillionaires” don’t bother citing the overriding authority for “shall not be infringed,” either, as they funnel money through billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s machine to swindle people into surrendering their rights, and putting those who won’t give them up at risk of being destroyed by the state.

Isn’t that right, Bill Gates & Co, who helped harass the hoi polloi in Washington State? How about it, Elaine Wynn and Sean Parker, who are trying to help Bloomberg buy the same results in Nevada?

And it’s not just in New Zealand that boltholes are being dug. The super rich are making sure they have secret hideaways all over the world, including in wilderness areas in this country, or technologically- advanced “billionaire bunkers” in populated areas, and some even have plans to float away from the reach of the unwashed masses should things break down completely.

And that collapse need not be an uprising of their less-privileged countrymen, whom they will happily abandon and lock out of their retreats (and order their armed guards to repel should the fences “cheap labor” beneficiaries dismiss for border security not prove persuasive around their own perimeters. There is any number of “Doomsday” scenarios, and it’s not like all of them will give warning, or that someone with a wilderness retreat will be able to bug out and fight his way through the zombie apocalypse, or EMP grid meltdown, or epidemic, or whatever to get there.
 
The curious thing is, when ordinary citizens have personal disaster preparedness plans and the resources to implement them, they’re often dismissed as kooky “preppers,” or worse, considered potential terrorists. No small part of that concern comes from the belief of the truly prepared that firearms will likely play a part in their personal security, and we know how the more “progressive” among connected social elites frown upon that. Also, nothing drives government control freaks crazier than someone who doesn’t depend on them, or have much use for those who do.

One can only wonder how the best laid schemes o’ Microsoft and men will play out should Bill and Melinda decide it’s time to take the BD-700 to a place with a private landing strip and plenty of space between them and their customers. That is, assuming the pilot can make his way to the airport, and doesn’t have a family of his own to get to. And that goes for security teams as well.
 
With just a (comparatively) measly localized hurricane, we saw hundreds of New Orleans cops abandoning their duties and taking care of Number One. What makes these billionaires think their security details won’t have families of their own that will be their first concerns, especially the worse things turn out to be? Or of the ones who do accompany their employers to survival retreats, how many will put their own lives on the line in a TEOTWAWKI scenario, when the chance presents itself to get out with a whole skin if only they dump the baggage? Men may die for a lot of things, for loved ones, for convictions, for country... but for their boss?

Will any of the unguarded guards come to the realization that they’re in a pretty nice and well-stocked place to ride things out, and take a page from the government playbook many of them know so well from prior careers? I’m talking about the one where the servants, those retained for the purposes of insuring tranquility, providing defense, promoting welfare, and securing liberty, decide it’s time to assume the role of master, and there’s not a thing their unarmed “patrons” can do about it...
 
It may not seem likely now, but come the time when fearful elites seek escape, it may turn out the Three Percenters, who will not disarm, will end up a lot better off than the One Percenters, currently (smugly) bankrolling initiatives aimed at forcing just that on them. Maybe the plutocrat wannabes ought to put some thought into words they’ve probably heard and kneejerk dismissed as primitive, irrelevant, provincial, even laughable, something about “the security of a free state,” and something else about “shall not be infringed”...

David Codrea is a field editor at GUNS Magazine, penning their monthly "Rights Watch" column. He provides regular reporting and commentary at Gun Rights Examiner and blogs at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. David Codrea's Archive page.