Safely Prosperous or Really Rich: Choosing Your Personal Financial Heaven

Chapter 17

The Capitalist Manifesto: Creating Wealth Out of Thin Air

Capitalists aren't just rich plutocrats on Wall Street. America has millions of them, and you can become one too. The strategies I will teach you in this chapter have created more millionaires than any other get-rich strategy.

The year was 1990, during the Gorbachev era and the days of glasnost and perestroika. Gorbachev was engaged in his ill-fated and naive attempt to save the unsavable Communist empire by reforming what he perceived to be the worst evils of the Communist system. Among other things, he thought he could improve the Communist state by introducing a whiff of the free market and a little bit of political freedom to a society that was ignorant of the barest rudiments of the genius of capitalism. Unfortunately for Gorbachev, that whiff of freedom was just enough to eventually destroy the Soviet system, which was held together only by terror and total oppression. The syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and I took 140 of my newsletter subscribers on a three-week tour of Russia and Ukraine to observe this dramatic and unprecedented history in the making.

Jack and I had dinner in an ill-lit room in one of the first privately owned restaurants in Moscow with a small group of men who were in the vanguard of the new, emerging Russia, including two who had just been elected to the Soviet parliament. They were bursting with enthusiasm for the new world being created around them as they told us of their dreams ...