Part One: Will the Real Vivek Please Stand Up?
From masking, taxes, J6, DEI, and more, no candidate since Mitt Romney in 2012 has flip-flopped on more issues than Vivek Ramaswamy.
While the left views common ground with an ideological opponent as betrayal, the right rushes to crown the opponent the next leader of neo-conservative thought.
Case in point: Vivek Ramaswamy.
He’s been on my program twice. I don’t dislike him, the political doesn’t have to be personal. I just don’t trust him. I don’t trust him because it seems that whatever he says today will change in just a couple of weeks and if you point this out he becomes indignant. I don’t know how this pattern of behavior qualifies someone as a potential leader of a party that is supposed to represent transparency and limited government.
The Death Tax
Ramaswamy talks a good game about the American dream and enjoying the fruits of one’s labor but here he takes a socialist turn when he argues for a “minimum 59%” death tax and cites socialist Thomas Piketty:
Third, to confront multigenerational wealth, Ramaswamy embraces inheritance taxes as a way to “save meritocracy from degenerating into aristocracy.” Ramaswamy flirts with a suggestion by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez to set the optimal inheritance tax rate in the United States at 59%. Lest you hope, as I did, that he might eventually walk that number back, he doubles down: “If anything, I’d take the figure Piketty and Saez arrive at as a minimum. We shouldn’t allow people to become billionaires just by having rich parents.”
To which I ask, why not? His answer: A very high inheritance tax is “a way of redistributing duty.” Those who become rich “owe it to everyone else to preserve meritocracy so others have the chance to do the same.” Two points here. First, their success should be proof that the system is, in fact, working. If they can make money through merit, others can, too. Second, people have moral duties apart from those that should be enforced by the state. Americans shouldn’t eat, smoke, and drink as much as they do. But few Americans want the government to restrict our consumption of these things. Similarly, the question isn’t whether those who make money should give generously to others but whether justice requires the state to appropriate people’s holdings involuntarily for the sake of meritocracy. Someone can have the moral duty to give without the state having the legal obligation to make him do it.
(Related video here in another discussion. He gives himself a buffer by saying it’s not practical in the U.S. but … )
Government should be the beneficiary of your life’s hard labor, not your own family, apparently.
COVID
When he wasn’t pushing COVID “vaccines,” Ramaswamy helped create, and tried to sell, a biomedical surveillance database to track all COVID patient records with his Roivant subsidiary Datavant:
In a pursuit forged through one of his subsidiary companies, a “health information” data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamy’s outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to “fight covid-19” by manufacturing a “single repository of all the real-world medical data” thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
Datavant claimed the records would be anonymized through their internal systems and that the broad database would only be available to researchers and government officials. However, some weren’t buying the sales pitch, citing gross violations of medical privacy. Moreover, none of the methods to supposedly anonymize records were made open source for review.
Nonetheless Ramaswamy’s Datavant sought to profit off of the hysteria and violate basic ethical standards in the process. They succeeded in establishing a partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While some companies were happy to contribute to the Datavant endeavor, citing the “national emergency” as the ultimate precedent for violating patient consent standards, many others balked at the idea, citing privacy issues.
His Roivant Sciences repeatedly partnered with Pfizer numerous times. On the company’s main purpose:
But in making his pitch to a different crowd, Mr. Ramaswamy was blunt about Roivant’s chief aim.
“This will be the highest return on investment endeavor ever taken up in the pharmaceutical industry,” he boasted in a cover story in Forbes.
The “Roi” in the company’s name stands for return on investment.
Juneteenth
He published a special video of himself commemorating Juneteenth before slamming Juneteenth two weeks later.
Masking
Ramaswamy called Bernie Sanders’s COVID mask bill “sensible” in his tweet supporting the idea, which he later denied ever saying while claiming he opposes mask mandates.
He also wrote in favor of mask mandates in a WSJ editorial, saying that while they probably slow the spread we should stop wearing them so we don’t create a super variant [bold may emphasis]:
The Omicron variant is spreading across the globe, but so far the strain appears to be less deadly than its predecessors. That’s good news, but here’s a risk that policy makers in every country should appreciate: Policies designed to slow the spread of Omicron may end up creating a supervariant that is more infectious, more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. That would be a man-made disaster.
To minimize that risk, policy makers must tolerate the rapid spread of milder variants. This will require difficult trade-offs, but it will save lives in the long run. We should end mask mandates and social distancing in most settings not because they don’t slow the spread—the usual argument against such measures—but because they probably do.
“Woke”
Ramaswamy was for “woke,” DEI in this case, until he decided to write a book against it. He still owns stake in his company, Roivant Sciences, and was still the company chairman until February of this year when he stepped down to run in the primary. Roivant Social Ventures, XXX, was launched while Ramaswamy was the CEO of Roivant.
RSV is a DEI initiative that uses buzzwords like “health equity,” and says a focus includes "building DEI opportunities for future leaders in biopharma and biotech."
The group's CEO, Lindsay Androski, wrote a September 2022 op-ed for the LA Times titled: "Why the lack of diversity in drug industry leadership is hurting women and people of color."
Ramaswamy says that when he approved the creation of the DEI department that it didn’t include the DEI initiatives, despite the S in RSV standing for “Social.”
He created Strive Asset Management in 2022 to tackle corporate ESG:
Critics of Ramaswamy have pointed out that Strive is effectively damaging its own mission right off of the bat by first purchasing shares and proceeding to add to the value of these companies, and then later hoping to convince them by proxy letter and/or vote to change their behaviors.
Strive quickly began toning down its “anti-woke rhetoric.”
Ramaswamy’s defenders are quick to accuse anyone questioning his issue acrobatics here as “attacking” — but isn’t questioning candidates, particularly those who come from out of nowhere with no political background — part of the election process?
I agree Dana. I like him too but he seems too wired.
He is a fraud. How are people not seeing this?