Charlie Munger Said He'd Have Been a 'Screaming Leftist' If He Saw Misery of Coal Miners – 'You Couldn't Be A Human Being' Without 'Feeling That'

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Charlie Munger Said He'd Have Been a 'Screaming Leftist' If He Saw Misery of Coal Miners – 'You Couldn't Be A Human Being' Without 'Feeling That'

Fahad Saleem

Sat, January 10, 2026 at 11:31 AM EST

3 min read

Charlie Munger said he might have been drawn to leftist ideas if he had seen the misery and harsh treatment coal miners once endured.

Talking about his childhood and early days in Omaha during an interview at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in 2017, the then–Berkshire Hathaway vice chair said he was raised by financially conservative people who believed in self-reliance, were skeptical of welfare and valued "hard money" such as gold.

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Munger said that while those practices may seem "backward" by today's standards, being raised that way helped him later in life and he never regretted not growing up in a liberal family.

"I had a liberal aunt, and she'd done her thesis on emissions in the coal mines, and of course she was a screaming leftist," he said. "I would be a screaming leftist if I observed the way the coal miners of yesteryear were treated, you couldn’t be a human being with any decency on you without feeling that it was deeply improper to have the misery that great."

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Munger's ‘Trick' in Life

Munger said his aunt used to send him left‑wing books, and he thought she was a bit of a ‘nut,' believing her view of reality sometimes misled her. Munger cautioned the audience to always guard against being misled by a wrong understanding of reality and said the "whole trick" in life is to never let your own mind deceive you.

‘I Was Very Judgemental'

Munger said that in his early days, he was quick to notice that even the successful people he admired had their own shortcomings. He saw where they were ‘nuts' and avoided those patterns and adjusted his judgments over time.

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"I was not a prodigy or anything like that but I was a prodigy in having adult interests," Munger said. "I was very judgmental and I think that helped me, I kept changing my judgments as I learned more and more facts came in. That created lifelong habits that were very, very useful."

Munger said another early influence on his thinking was his paternal grandfather, a federal judge, who believed it was a moral duty to become as "unignorant" and "unstupid" as possible and to stick to rationality at all costs.

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"He really believed that rationality was a moral duty and he worked at it and he scorned people who didn't do it," he said.

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This article Charlie Munger Said He'd Have Been a 'Screaming Leftist' If He Saw Misery of Coal Miners – 'You Couldn't Be A Human Being' Without 'Feeling That' originally appeared on Benzinga.com

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