The Moral Calculations of a Billionaire

> “I’ll admit, it’s very hard,” he said. “It’s gotten harder. But the 99 percent can still join the 1 percent. It’s possible with enough luck and commitment.”

I would probably calculate that my morals tell me it’s a good idea to buy a newspaper where I can run stories that allow criticism of people like me so I can frame the extent of discussion by being first to bring it up. We care about this so much that we just can’t suffer in silence any more, and not because the current state of the world makes the topic inevitable. I can even actively cheer for the system that made it happen as long as it’s written in a tone that reminds us we’re all in this together reacting to some unpredictable outside force and never influencing any of its rules.

> “So they’d agreed to set up a family foundation that would eventually give away more than 90 percent of their money, and Cooperman had decided that rather than retiring in earnest, he would continue to manage their account so there would be more to give away.”

Look at this one guy who isn’t me who learned being rich isn’t even that fun because he ran out of things to buy. He’s only keeping 10%, and you can see that 10 is a very small number, almost a single digit. If you do accidentally think about how much 10% of a billion is in dollars, please compare his lump sum reinvestment seed today to your total possible lifetime earnings after you work for a few more decades. That will be your biggest number, which makes it the fairest comparison.

If he has more than a single billion then that’s a good thing because it means there’s a bigger percentage going to you. The world would be a better place if more billionaires were willing to suffer as much as this gentleman by deferring retirement and earning more money in tireless pursuit of the common good.

Look, one of his bicycles is old. He mentioned a supermarket chain by name, and you shop at that store, so the moral of the story is that maybe we’re not so different after all and that hate has no home here if you want to be a good person. It’s okay, you didn’t know any better.

The everyone can make it mentality can only work with a perpetually growing population and economy. Once the population is stagnating, you'll have to learn to share. Nobody wants to share.

One of the most amusing aspects of a capitalistic market is that it obviously does not engage in its most prominent activity namely the allocation of goods to those who need them most once you apply this principle to money and land.

Money goes to the rich through interest payments and land is usually sold because you are behind on your debt payments. This means money and land will always end up with those who need them the least. The fact that such an obvious principle was broken from the start does not instill confidence that rebooting "real capitalism"(the utopian fairy tale where everyone supposedly wins) will solve the problem.