Quote:
Originally Posted by Old Mechanic
My aunt told me once that we should do more for the poor so they could improve their lives.
I told her to go to downtown Norfolk and pick out a "poor" person and give them 20k dollars. She was worth about 2 mil at the time. She looked at me like I was crazy. I told her if she gave the 20k to the govt, that same poor person would never see a dime of that money. (She died two years later and the property the family had bought 60 years earlier had been sold and she paid $500,000 in taxes on the inflation driven value of the property 6 months before she died).
Bottom line is even when you have a significant amount of money few people feel like they are the wealthy elite that we all love to hate. After all they are the ultimate minority, very few with a lot of capital.
Does anyone here actually know any of these wealthy egomaniacs? You know the ones who are pulling all of our strings, being as we all are such puppets to be so manipulated.
While I am sure there are some out there, most of the people I have known in my lifetime, in the category I would call fairly well off (others might call wealthy) the overwhelming majority are people who worked their arses off to get where they are and consider their success as not as significant as many would.
In fact I once calculated the value of the retirement commitments and medical benefit commitments my father earned with combat military service and civil service retirement and found it to be around 2 million dollars, depending on how long he lives, which is currently approaching 90 this May.
He sure does not fit the "elite" categorization.
You know when we go there, hating those who have succeeded (in our perspective) those same wealthy "elites" might just do the same thing the "elites" in Germany did in the 1930s, which is to get the heck out of this country and go somewhere where their success is appreciated. We all know how that scapegoat oriented society ended up, right?
A lot of wealthy people are old and in bad health, so lets hate them for success and ignore their medical condition. We wouldn't want to have to sympathise with someone who had money, now would we?
regards
Mech
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Let's look at it another way. The promise of being in the United States is
1. It's the land of opportunity.
2. Upward mobility in the socioeconomic system.
Now, I never had a problem with people making money or being successful, quite on the contrary, you come up with something that works for you and you can be rich here.
The problem is when you use your money and influence to subjugate other people and damage the society.
Not every rich person out there is a self centered, sociopathic jerk; but our culture promotes that type of behavior. We have the freedom to do what we want to do and leave me the hell alone.
Sorry, doesn't work that way. We are affected directly or indirectly by the choices of other people whether we like it or not. And when those choices hurt people, you want to find out who the troublemakers are.
Look at why we are here on ecomodder.com; a lot of us prior to the conditions getting this bad never cared about efficiency until some people who happen to control a resource that we currently need decided that they were going to go in for the kill profit wise. Then "we" start talking about how to improve this situation working with the technology we currently have and inspiring each other to develop things and try driving techniques that will allow us to use less of a resource that is controlled by a group of malicious individuals. The more we share, the better it is for all of us.
Look at all the inventors that either got bought off or killed because they found an energy solution. Why? Because "they" have to continue to make money.
2 million dollars in today's money, while it being a lot, is not a lot.
I'm talking about the class of people that operate in the 9 figure and beyond catagory, legacy money.