The agenda is power which ultimately boils down to the enslavement of all humanity.
^^^ which is a good point.
Think about some of these James Bond villain types…
Let’s take 1 billion dollars personal net worth. Just 1 billion.
At 5 percent interest and 3 percent inflation and 17 percent tax rate… realistic with good money management… you get 41 million a year, after taxes for doing nothing. A year.
Let’s take someone like Gates whose fortune is c 60 billion. Or Buffet. Or Bezos or Musk. Same investment and tax parameters.
That is 2.5 billion a year, just in interest. For doing nothing at all.
No human being can spend 2.5 billion a year. There is no amount of consumer goods that you could consume that would cost 2.5 billion a year. In short, you end up with so much cash you can’t possibly get any enjoyment out of it.
One way you could go is to distribute to make the world a better place. But how crazed is your mind when you have so much money that you can literally change the world with your giving… you must, psychologically, develop nearly a God complex.
Yup, maybe you want to make the world a better place… but what makes you think your image, dictated by your spending, is the right one? What do you do to people who get in your way? How do you think of the little ants… who may not want your help or your ideas or your largesse? Troublesome little beings to be swept away.
What if you hire people to do it for you… what kind of people are going to crave the purse-strings? Officious little activists with god complexes of their their own? Mini tyrants… with personal agendas… like the ones controlling the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and thousands of other slush funds that have no bearing on their founders wishes?
Most of these people are simply mad. With the power they can’t handle.
A few have managed to quietly lead some amazing lives and do good works… Paul Allen and Steve Woszniak come to mind. But who will take over their fortunes and steer them toward, well, evil.
Now don’t get me wrong… I am an bigtime capitalist and think that if you amassed 100 billion the you should keep it and do what you want with it. I don’t advocate saying “you have xx and thats all you get.” No way! The more the better says I. It’s how you motivate people and, well, it is the engine that has built the human race. Acquisitiveness!!!
But maybe it would be nice for some of these folks to set their giant ego’s into neutral for just long enough to say to themselves… “maybe I don’t have the right to shape everyone else’s life just because mine turned out well.”
Students of Philosophy may have some input…
But our Founders, mostly rich men, created a vision that “my freedom stops where it infringes on your freedom.”
What am interesting world view they had. They could have created anything when they created the framework for America. They could have been kings, lords and potentates over the greatest sea of natural resources and land on the planet. Instead they decided that, instead of unthinkable personal wealth and power, individual freedoms for every little person… mattered so much that they created a system where money was not supposed to trump freedom.
An amazing foundation we are built on.
And why our Constitutional Republic is UTTERLY not able to co-exist with philosophies that require the group over the individual. Call it socialism or communism or compliance or hive living or submission to a person or a government.
Anyhoo… Maggot’s point about power is right on. Money is power. And once you have more than you spend, the way so many of these sick fucks wield their money is to impose their power on others. Which is totally against the system that let them earn it in the first place.
Nietzsche, I think said “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” He was not talking about government or church power, I don’t think. Maybe he was talking more about the individual. He was talking about the fact that the human mind may not be capable of dealing with power and influence beyond a certain point. It collapses into a form of madness and psychosis… unable to cope. Maybe unable to grasp the meaning of such power, conveyed by infinite wealth and a world of no limits when it comes to any whim or desire.
Personally, I think our Founding Fathers subscribed to a simpler dictum. “Nobody should ever consider themselves too rich to mow their own lawn.”
Kind of always been my philosophy.
Hellauva a day for ranting, huh?
Sirhr
