I have more than a few contradictory views re money. I try to resolve them by wondering how much money is enough. At what point does wealth become too much? After all, is a billion dollars in personal wealth OK in this world? Back in the 1960s I used to think that if one had a million dollars in personal wealth, that was enough; more than that should be 100% taxed or confiscated for redistribution. Now, of course, having a million dollars in personal worth is nothing special. It's common even among a broad swath of the middle class. Maybe it's just inflation since USA prices are now almost exactly ten times what they were in the 1960s. So let's make it ten million. Anyone should be able to own and keep that much. More than that should go to the commonwealth. Own a billion dollars? Ten billion, fifty, one hundred billion? I don't think a person could spend a billion dollars on any personal lifestyle in a lifetime. You'd have to spend about $50,000 a day, every day for 72 years to spend a billion dollars and change. And, again, that's just one billion. There are hundreds of billionaires in America, some of them many times over. Who's scarier, those folks or the poor bum on your corner asking for a buck?
I'm actually fearful of those fat cats with multiple billions of dollars in personal wealth. That's enough to support a modern army. Maybe Bill Gates is too nice-nice to think of waging a war but what about his progeny down the road? History offers many examples. What would you do with 75 or 80 billion dollars? Why not take over a part of America by paying off its debt, say the Pacific Northwest and upper CA, and establish a new, more purely "constitutional" Palin style "democracy". A privatization of governmental debt and a private army to maintain order could do the trick. It's the same idea as privatized urban services writ very large. It's no longer completely crazy to think that the USA is likely to split into separate countries, maybe four or five. After all, the extremists out there now are talking "revolution" and "lock and load" and scarcely hide their racism and bigotry anymore. Old fashioned Texans are still lusting to create a Central American empire that would include the 19C US Confederacy and Mexico and its neighbors. I wonder what those Mexican and other Central American drug kingpins really plan to do with their billions? Invest in better modes of agriculture? They've already destabilized the Mexican government (with its huge oil reserves). Why shouldn't they think of creating a criminal military empire in the Americas and front it with the idiocy of the new American southernism, a new KKK, and a return to slavery south of the "border"? Look at European history after 500 A.D. Welcome to the second Dark Age. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Michael Brady <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Mon, November 15, 2010 8:33:11 AM Subject: Re: "This study examines the process of commercialization of art which took place in Antwerp during the long sixteenth century, an era of rapid expansion of both the city's economy and its art market." William wrote: > Why is everyone so shocked and outraged when artists make money from their work? > Few complain when someone makes a high salary in engineering, medicine, or law. > One would think artists are crooks or frauds for making a living. Making and having money is considered morally compromised and presumptively sinful or disreputable. Doctors and lawyers are protected from this opprobrium because they provide important and highly specialized services that directly help people in distress (except greedy bastard corporate lawyers and cosmetic surgeons who charge high fees for botox or doctors in the thrall of Big Pharma who needlessly and carelessly kill people through malpractice because they really don't care about the poor). Art is pure, it is the avenue for people to get in touch with their passions and inner feelings and insightfulness, so it cannot be sullied by concerns about money and lucre. Artists should starve in their garrets, not eat well in their townhouses. Being suspicious of money and people with money is a favorite theme of American literature since at least Babbit, and probably before that. It's played up in the trivialized version of political discourse played out as high drama by pretty TV anchor persons and pundits who make 6- and 7-figure salaries while spouting ersatz consevato-populist-liberal ideas. Eventually, the suspicion of moneyed interests gets around to banking and investment firms, frankly, when that happens, almost inevitably there's the odor of aniti-Semitism wafting in the background. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
