It is a safe rule of thumb that you must be doing something right if the Daily Telegraph doesn't like you. Yesterday, a Telegraph blogger turned on George Soros, thus confirming his mutation from dastardly currency speculator to progressive champion. This – it must be admitted – is an improbable outcome for a man who made his name and enhanced his fortune betting against the Bank of England on Black Wednesday. At the time he seemed to represent the worst of capitalism, but even then he was no ordinary City spiv. He grew up as a Jewish teenager in Nazi-occupied Hungary, and in 1979 began sponsoring black students in apartheid South Africa. He founded one of the first hedge funds, but since the 1990s has given away $7bn "to support human rights, freedom of expression, and access to public health and education". This week he hit the news for giving $1m towards the campaign for a yes vote in the forthcoming Californian referendum on legalising marijuana. His Open Society foundations have helped build democratic cultures in many eastern European states. His warnings about the dangers of unregulated big finance came true. Some – mostly on the right – see all this as the eccentric plaything of a billionaire. Some – on the left – would rather he hadn't made his money in the first place, or had been made to lose it all in taxes. But he did make it and now he is using it in ways that only the most curmudgeonly of his critics could fail to admire.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/28/in-praise-of-george-soros
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