3-03-05, 8:45 am

Today’s Capitalism Gone Mad story in the general press goes beyond Marx, Engels, Jonathan Swift, Mel Brooks, even the late great Ernie Kovacs. It concerns a man of mystery named Walter Anderson whom a New York Times story calls the greatest tax evader in U.S. history. Since the U.S. has the lowest rate of effective taxation on corporations and wealthy individuals in the developed world, that is quite an achievement. But the fellow, Walter Anderson, appears to be quite a character, to say the least. First of all he has a penchant, some might say a fetish, for changing his name, which apparently started early, since his mother informed government agents that he had been born Walter Anderson Crump. He apparently developed a series of other aliases to hide his assets, dressed exclusively in Black, and somewhat like the great Chicago utilities swindler of the 1920s and 1930s, Samuel Insull, established so confusing a set of corporate entities even the prosecutors couldn’t figure them out.

But that is only the beginning. Anderson started 15 years ago with MCI, formed his own long-distance phone company, profited apparently from the deregulation and entered the business that really interested him – space travel. The downfall of the Soviet Union enabled him to buy the rights to the Mir space station for $31 million. He then founded Rotary Rocket, a space travel business that didn’t quite work out, and then continued his telecommunications businesses, setting up 'offshore entities' in the British Virgin Islands and Panama to transfer his assets.

Meanwhile, according to the U.S. government, he transferred at least $450 million out of the U.S. between 1995 and 1999. In 1998 for example, he paid only $494 total in federal taxes.

Anderson had other ways to hide his wealth, including making large gifts to a number of his girlfriends. After the government began to go after him, he declared one of these previously cited gifts a 'business loan' and sued her.

But the strangest thing about Anderson, or maybe in our capitalist society, not so strange, was one of his aliases, Ragnor Danksjold, which the NYT sees as a variation on Ragnor Danneskjold, a character in Ayn Rand’s campy glorification of Social Darwinism and Laissez-Faire capitalism, Atlas Shrugged. (Rand called her jivey mish mash of Herbert Spencer and Friedrich Nietzsche 'objectivism' meaning that a social law of the jungle represents the highest level of science.) That very wild and crazy character was a capitalist pirate who stole wealth from the ships of socialist countries and redistributed the wealth to the great capitalist supermen of the world beset by the injustices of taxation and regulation.

Anderson or Crump or Danksjold is in jail now, but who knows for how long. And who knows that he may to the Bush believers become a martyr, one of Ayn Rand’s persecuted superheroes who transcend the mediocre masses and governments that putrefy for civilization.

The New York Times story ends with a quote from an interview that Anderson gave five years ago, in which he discussed a Space Station that he wished to build, where he would be the only authority and peace and tranquility would reign. 'I’m not saying its fair, but I’ve been thinking about human rights in space and in my space station, people would all be peaceful or I would throw them out of the air lock.'

You can’t make up stuff like that. In a year where The Aviator, starring Leonardo Di Caprio, focuses on another Ayn Rand type 'hero,' Howard Hughes, who took some time to reach the psychological place where Anderson may be now, Anderson has finally been caught for the moment and we are told that 'justice' may be done.

But what is 'justice' in a system that enables a character like Anderson to control what the NYT sees as an estimated billion dollars in wealth and play hide and seek with it for more than a decade. What kind of system makes people like Anderson who hide wealth like squirrels hide nuts into entrepreneurial heroes while productive working people pay more in regressive taxes in a month than Anderson Crump pays income taxes in a year get less in social benefits than people in any other developed country.

And what kind of system for that matter has as its unelected Federal Reserve Chair, the second most powerful position in the country, Alan Greenspan, a former figure in Ayn Rand’s 'objectivist' movement, setting currency policy. Yesterday Greenspan told Congress that the present deficits were not sustainable and recommended a policy of tax increases and spending cuts. He might have a discussion with Anderson Crump in jail before he has to assume the identity of Danneskjold. And, if the other 'hot' news item of the moment, Paul Wolfowitz as a candidate to lead the World Bank is true, then he, Greenspan, and Anderson Crump, might dump Ayn Rand for a global capitalist version of the Three Musketeers.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.

» Go to more articles from PA's online edition.

» Go to sample articles from this month's print edition

» Support PA with your subscription