Martin Hash wrote: ↑Thu Jun 10, 2021 9:43 am
DB, you idolize the wrong people. What the fuck has a rich person who inherited their wealth from a lucky forebearer ever done to deserve your unbridled admiration?
R U literally more proud of the money you've made than the accomplishments you've achieved? Do you consider accumulating money an accomplishment? Fuck, dude, spend your fucking money to finance more accomplishments. Fuck your kids; they can earn their own goddamn money.
Unless your main goal is to become part of the aristocracy? Is that it? Do you wish to establish a fiefdom? I warn you: the future you're advocating only has openings for a few very, very lucky winners, and everyone else is a serf. You're betting extremely long odds.
No, I'm simply a pragmatist with a teeny-tiny History degree. I think you and most other people are following the wrong narrative, despite your vast world experience and extreme education. Government indoctrination against the wealthy is subtle, globally prevalent, and often so transparent to those who adopt the belief that they're completely unaware they've been conditioned at all.
It's not that I love the rich. I simply recognize them as magnitudes less dangerous than the government. In fact, were we to put the body count of individual rich people up against the body count of governments - I think you'd be hard pressed to explain why more government and fewer rich people is preferable.
Bill Gates has never run a concentration camp. Jeff Bezos has never implemented a policy that starved 20 million people. Mark Zuckerberg has never buried villages of people and trampled the ground covering them with horses. Rich people are far, far, far less dangerous to me than a bunch of idiot citizens pretending that they're running a government.
Now, you might say - BUT THE GOVERNMENT IS MADE OF RICH PEOPLE. This is a case of A = B, but B *not* equaling A. Sure, the people in power tend to be wealthy - often directly from being in power. But you'll never catch them vilifying themselves, will you? Nancy Pelosi will never come out and say
"Me defrauding the taxpayers with pork barrel projects for a lifetime has fucked you all over, I should be taxed into oblivion!"
Nope.
The rich people in government will always be trying to expand their own power and wealth at the expense of the rich people *not* in government. So you see, I don't think rich people are the problem. At least, they certainly aren't the problem anywhere near the level that government is.
So ... you want more government, which I consider the greater evil of the two. I'm ambivalent towards rich people existing. I don't believe the government when they tell me that Amazon caused the homeless crisis in Seattle. I don't believe the government when they tell me CEOs golden parachutes are causing the wealth gap and not their policies of offshoring jobs and printing money to infinity. In short, I don't drink the government's Kool-Aid on rich people anymore than I drink their Kool-Aid on white supremacists being the biggest threat to America.
But I accept that almost everyone else does chug that beverage.
