The Best of the Penguins

 "Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing," Orwell wrote in the first sentence of his classic essay on the English novelist. 

And Orwell himself, it would seem, is considered by many to be worth stealing as well. 

By Ken Griffin, for instance. 

Griffin apparently invoked Orwell's name the other day in his ongoing feud with Mayor Mamdani about New York's proposed pied-à-terre tax on second homes in the state—which would include a bill for Griffin's $238 million penthouse in Manhattan.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Griffin responded to the rumored tax—and one of Mamdani's videos promoting it—by offering to mail out a copy of Orwell's Animal Farm to every high schooler in the city. 

This is what I mean about people appropriating Orwell. 

Because, yes, Orwell detested Stalinism; as do I. I object to Stalinism as much as Griffin. 

But to invoke the memory of Orwell—a lifelong democratic socialist—to oppose a modest tax increase on a property worth hundreds of millions of dollars—is an absurd distortion. 

Griffin is not so much in the tradition of Orwell as in that of Bertrand—the exquisitely annoying Tory artist in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim—who said of the postwar Labour government that Orwell supported: 

But their home policy... soak the rich ... I mean ...‘Well, it is that, pure and simple, isn’t it? I’m just asking for information, that’s all. I mean that’s what it seems to be, don’t we all agree? I take it that it is just that and no more, isn’t it?'

As another one of New York City's reigning oligarchs reportedly put it yesterday—springing to Griffin's defense: 

"I must say that I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ — quote, tax the rich — when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs[.]"

He added:

"The rich [...] are at the top of the great American economic pyramid for a reason. They should be praised and thanked."

Shades here, too, of Bertrand: 

'[S]hall I tell you what else I happen to like? Rich people. I take pride in the contemporary unpopularity of that statement. [...] I like them and that’s why I don’t want them soaked. All right?'

To which Jim Dixon's inward response in the novel seems the best available: 

"Bertrand's speech [...] annoyed him in more ways than he'd have believed possible."

The Vornado CEO's argument, like Bertrand's, appears to be that the rich must not be taxed because they are just better than other people. We should know our place. 

Griffin's seems to be more of a non sequitur: Stalinism is bad (which we all agree on). 

But he also accused Mamdani of driving away "success" from the city—a more conventional conservative argument against progressive taxation that at least makes a pretense of public-spiritedness. 

As Anatole France sardonically quoted the argument a century ago in Penguin Island: 

"The poor live on the wealth of the rich and that is the reason why that wealth is sacred. Do not touch it [....] You will get no great profit by taking from the rich, for they are very few in number; on the contrary you will strip yourself of all your resources and plunge the country into misery." And so it is better, they say, to take from the poor. 

As France adds with a wink—this argument must be sound, since "in fifteen hundred years the best of the Penguins will not speak otherwise." 

It appears they are speaking thus still.