> there’s a deep-rooted feeling that you don’t show that you make money
> It’s more like, if someone has something I can’t have, I’d rather deprive this person from having it than trying to work hard to get it myself
This. A lot of people still don't understand money can me made. They see succesfull men and woman and assume the money must have been stolen instead of made.
Secondly, is it reasonable to assume that one might find distaste for people with money who flaunt it? And that this might cause one to share that distaste for others with money, even if they don't flaunt to such a degree? I realize the latter half is a generalization that can cause problems, I'm just trying to state a rather "human" response. If it is constantly shoved in your face that certain people drive cars worth enough that it could bring your family out of debt for life, you may grow bitter at this.
I believe money can be made, I just also believe there are a lot of "bad actors" in the system, for whom it is "stolen" to some degree, and it only seems to be becoming more common.
Corruption is the core problem. I think that worry about corrupt businesses is misplaced when a corrupt government is 10x worse.
everything from insider trading
There's a good example right there. Congress can inside trade. It's absolutely extraordinarily corrupt. They wrote a law a while back to prevent it when there was some press on it, but then quietly scaled back the restriction.
Consider this: Political office holders can lie to us outrageously and never face repercussions besides (perhaps) not being re-elected in a future cycle. You could list case after case of politicians who knowingly made definitive, verifiably false claims that have caused real damages to people. If they were officers of a public company, they would be sued into oblivion. They would be hounded by the Justice Department. But since they're in the political club, they've written the rules so that they can't be held accountable.
Worrying about private sector corruption misplaced? One shouldn't have to tolerate _any_ kind of corruption.
Well, that's textbook Marxism, strong here in the US, I assume much stronger in France (after all the French Communist Party is still competitive to a fair degree, per Wikipedia was part of the "Plural Left" coalition that held the legislature from 1997–2002).
ADDED: and our path is particularly odd there: as has been joked for some time, there is no French word for entrepreneur.
A goofy quote from G.W. Bush relaunched by Newsweek some months ago.
What it's hard for people to understand is that both "stealing" and "making" are simplistic ideals, and that reality is much more complex for most of us.