Ranked from the least ethical to the most ethical, without a doubt:
- Commision-based; represents financial services firm
- Salary based fundraisers; represents one of many nonprofits
- Fee and commission based Investment Advisor; represents client and firm
- Fee only, represents client only
- Pro bono Morals Tutor to America's Wealthiest Families, represents the Public Interest only
This hierarchy was provoked by an attorney friend who, like Jay Hughes, sees representing wealthy families for a fee as the highest form of Philanthropic Advisory service from which all others are a falling off or perversion. My point is that representing Dynastic Wealth is not a calling, or a vocation, nor a Hero's Journey, as Jay and followers often represent it. The Sopranos - they would call such a trusted confidential servant, Consigliere, not Homme De Confiance, or some such cant phrase. Serving Dynastic Wealth so that the family can become a Tribe, going on like the Maya for thousands of years, may be an ideal for an Aristocratic Society, but it is not an American ideal. Serving wealth and serving democracy are not the same thing. T o serve concentrated wealth and power for a fee is a good way to make a living, and if you believe Jay a good way to be a good person, but that is an alibi, plain and simple. "The Family Compact," as Jay calls it, is not the social compact. If you serve society in the halls of wealth you will sleep in a Dumpster. You won't go from shirtsleeves to wealth to shirtsleeves in three generations. You will join the tens of millions who are born into poverty and stay there for one thousand years, as the Scion of the Ruling Class rides by in a limousine, with his Homme de Confiance in the back seat whispering in his ear about the family and its "human capital." This one working for the CIA. That one heading a bank. Another in Congress. Another running Forbes. Another running Harpers. Another a judge. Another running Exxon. Another regulating the oil and gas business. Another an Arch Bishop. Another on the Board at Hudson Institute, and so forth. So that the family and its human assets are in control positions, interlocked, throughout our society, doing deals behind the scenes, and bettering themselves endlessly generation after generation. So that family governance behind the scenes, with the heads of a few other families, is a shadowy government for the globe. If there were a manual on how to do it, Jay Hughes has written it, though tactfully and sometimes in code.
My post here is in part a response to Jay's new book, Family: The Compact Between Generations. I will blog it as I read it carefully. An important book and a milestone on the road from Democracy to Aristocracy, though I take Jay's point that America was founded by Aristos and never departed from that tradition. So we just have a revival is all. To my fellow advisors, whether paid on fees or commissions: Realize in reading Jay that he is a master flatterer of wealth and power. From the first sentence the book flatters the reader, in large part by alluding to humane book-learning that most advisors sadly lack. (Never trust an attorney who alludes to Dante, would be a good rule of thumb; next thing you know, he will be reading from Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, or Machiavelli. He knows he has you literally out-classed and is playing you as he might a client, as a Richelieu might play an idiot King. When a man who knows you have not read Dante alludes to him, beware. If you find yourself fawning, you may assume that this is part of your training. Fawning comes with this role.) As a cultural ignoramus, be aware of your own motivation as you read. Be careful not to fall, upstart as thou art, into the illusion that you are somehow a fine fellow in lackeying wealth for your fee. Perpetuating the Bush Tribe, or the Rockefeller Tribe, or the Sopranos, or the Gambino Family, is fine, but it is not an ideal per se. Speak up for your country, and pay the price. If you do have a solid liberal arts background, use it, as I do naked in the streets, tossing the rich man's coin back at his feet. But don't set yourself up as a moral exmplar. God knows, a mob lawyer is no worse than I am, but at least I know I am a scumbag.
