Mama writes:
A homeless person who only makes a dollar a day could just as easily argue that the person making $10 an hour is stealing it.I’m pointing out the utter stupidity of saying the rich stole the money they have.
Why assume most rich people are unethical? They might be but where’s the evidence? The main reason some people are so rich is technology. In the past a brilliant author could sell only one copy of her book because she wrote it by hand. Today with the printing press, the same author can sell 10 million copies. It’s technology that amplifies are productivity creating huge inequality.
I get the feeling you are young man, Mama. I am probably old enough to be your Dad. I have never made much money in life, but in part that is because I am extremely ethical about money and business matters. It’s not just the rich. Even making a fairly decent income in this society seems to involve being a scum of sort of or another.
The times when I was making the most money in life were the times when I had jobs that should have had titles like Assistant Scumbag Analytical Engineer at Dirtball Associates. One such job was a paralegal working for an attorney. I made all my money just working on one case. The guy we were representing was a physician who was an extreme scumbag. On the other hand, he was loaded (well of course) and we were basically using him as our personal ATM machine. As his personal ATM machine was always working, he really didn’t mind forking it like crazy in our direction.
Here is what this physician did. Nowadays they have wonderful, charming seminars for physicians that shows you how, for example, to take a $3,000 operation and break it into four little separate baby operations and then charge $2000 for each one. So a $3,000 operation automagically becomes an $8,000 operation.
This guy was mainly involving things like sewing people’s finders back on who got them chopped off in accidents, so he had them over a barrel. They had to get sewn up fast and after they save the digit, they wake up and the $5,000 operation has ballooned into four baby operations for a total of $12,000. The digitless fellow is left holding the bag and the doctor is out the door.
There were many complaints and possibly even lawsuits filed against him for this practice. The case went before the Medical Board, and they pulled the guy’s surgical privileges at most of the area hospitals where he was operating. There went most of his business, but a least a criminal had finally been thwarted. He responded by suing the Medical Board and the individual physicians who sat on it which was a very sleazy thing to do. So I was making money by helping this crook steal from hospital patients having emergency operations. That was what was required for me to make $23/hour in 1990, which is probably $30/hour now, but who knows.
You just know that if you want to make more than that, you are going to have to be even dirtier than I was being.
In addition, I have looked into a lot of other ways of getting good money, and most of them involve scumbaggery or one sort or another that I am not willing to do. In addition, I know some rich people, including relatives. Most of them had a serious “mean/ruthless/whatever you want to call it” streak. One guy I grew up with was determined to be a millionaire. This guy basically woke up every morning and said, “Today I am going to do everything I can every minute of this day to become a millionaire.” I recently read a story about him on the Internet, and he is now married, and yes, he is indeed a millionaire. He’s also one of the bigger assholes I have ever known in life.
If there is that much assholery involved in simply making a bank wage job or salary ($20-60/hour), well, you can imagine that the scumbaggery obviously increases exponentially as one migrates up the income scale. How many businessmen instead of being called businessmen should be called “scammers” or simply “criminals.” A very, very large number of them.
Source of knowledge: A lifetime of careful observation.