Hedge Fund manager and former Goldman Sachs banker Leon Cooperman, as self-made a billionaire as any billionaire can be, released today a scathing public letter to Barack Obama. 

I read his letter and tried to keep an open mind, so hopefully if he's got an intern Googling for responses, he'll read my reply.

Dear Mr. Cooperman,

If you, as a self-described man of great wealth feel unfairly attacked and put upon by society and the government, how on Earth do you imagine that the rest of us, also all hard workers, feel?

You really won me over when you pointed out that your success is attributable to both your hard work and to luck.  That means that you know that hard work is not always rewarded with great wealth.  Indeed, it is usually not awarded with great wealth. 

If you feel aggrieved, I'm sorry.  It's not personal.  It's that most of us will work as hard as you did and will get nothing like the security that you have won for yourself and your family.  Instead, we will worry about health care, about getting laid off and about sending our kids to college.  We will worry that we might never get to retire and could be expected to work until we reach our graves.

You mentioned all of the jobs that you and your friends have created.  I believe it would be more accurate to say that these are jobs you control or direct.  They are really created by the aggregate demand of the world's people.  You just get to decide what the job descriptions will be and, to the extent the market will allow it, how little you can get away with paying.  It's, at best, a symbiotic system, so it's not really fair for the richest among us to talk about "job creation" as if it's some sort of favor they've done for society. If anything, by directing the jobs of the vast majority of people, the richest among us are an undemocratic social force.  Don't worry, I'm not straying into "all work is slavery" territory here.  I'm saying that because you're a job creator and I'm not, that your priorities will matter a great more to society and to people's lives than mine will.  Even if a lot of people might prefer my priorities to yours.

You also claimed for yourself and your friends, credit for progress in general, which seems to give short shrift to the contributions of the vast majority of the world's population.  But, again, what I really think you mean is that you and your friends get to direct progress for much of the world.  It's just like with the jobs, see?  Your vision matters more than other people's.  It might be that people prefer your vision or it might not.  We don't know.  We don't have those kinds of discussions.  The vast majority of us are consulted only during elections (during which the wealthy use their advantage to help candidates reach us en masse, earning personal access for themselves while the rest of us get by with theoretical representation) and by our consumption choices (which are gain influenced and sometimes dictated from higher up the economic food chain).

It's interesting, Mr. Cooperman, that your open letter to Obama was covered so widely in the media.  I don't expect that if I wrote an open letter to the president that anyone would care much, even though it's possible that I might have more interesting things to say (not claiming it's true, just saying it's possible).  Why do you think that is that your letter should get so much more attention than the thousands of others that Americans have written to their President at any given time?  In your letter you explicitly say that you're not much of a social thinker or writer.  I think you're too hard on yourself.  You wrote a good letter, which is why I'm responding to you.  But surely you see that your wealth has also granted you a certain importance in the eyes of others.

You mentioned that you're a signatory of Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge, where half, or more, of your fortune will be put to good charitable use by a trust of Buffett's design.  I applaud you and thank you.  But two things, and please don't take this the wrong way.  First, your heirs will still have a leg up on the rest of the world.  You could give away 90% of your fortune and still leave them with the freedom not to have to ever take a job they don't want.  Second, while billionaire philanthropy is a wonderful thing it is, by definition, directed by billionaires.  This philanthropy, then, is an extension of a small minority's power to influence society and the course of future events.  Better than charity would be more equal wealth distribution so that society could be shaped by a broader set of priorities and esthetics.

You called on the President to elevate the level of discourse to a more civil, transcendent tone. Fair point, as that is what he promised back in 2008.  But the President represents 300 million Americans who have been mostly been left out of very important discussions about how we should all live, work and die.  If anything, he hasn't gone far enough in articulating that.

But, I agree with you on one thing -- I'd love to have a more open, philosophical and participatory political system where honest debates aren't drowned by rancorous shouting.  How will you help us get there, Mr. Cooperman?  I don't think that asking Obama to ignore the reality of life for the vast majority of Americans, who have worked every bit as hard as you have for far less, is going to cut it.  We can only have the discourse you want when more people are empowered.  That means more people must share in the wealth that we all create and more people should have a voice in the direction of our common progress.

Sincerely,

Destor23