Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The Fallacy of Relevancy of Wealth

People like Gov Scott Walker or Rep Paul Ryan delude themselves into believing they were relevant to their billionaire masters .

What most of the one percent fail to realize is that they are meat shields for the 0.1%.

The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is three orders of magnitude both literally and figuratively. The literally part is self evident, but the figuratively part is so hard for most people to grasp that they don't.

At billionaire status, money becomes irrelevant to action. Want a car? Done. Want a house? Done. Want an island? Okay, maybe you need to finance that one - but you can. Fantasy and reality blur. Money is an abstraction; money is a way of keeping score. It's just numbers. To really keep score you need a new yardstick. How many cars? Are they this months' fashion? Do you own a house in the right location (nevermind that you have no idea what it looks like even though the broker whose name you don't remember sent you pictures, as long as the property management people turn a profit renting it out, and you can say you own a house in the right neighborhood).

The one percent can't do these things. So many of the one percent struggle with the same stupid shit the rest of us do, they just find a way to make it all a lot more expensive for themselves and thus live the same paradigm, it just costs more. (Okay, yes, orders of magnitude between vacationing at the state park campground and the chalet on France, but it remains an issue of budget constraint rather than absurdist fantasy.)



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