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> Many people assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be a good person. I used to agree with that, but now politics has cleaved this into two. A) If
by 0xfeba 10y ago
> Many people assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be a good person.
I used to agree with that, but now politics has cleaved this into two.
A) If you're a democrat/progressive (Soros, Hillary, et al.) you're corrupt, greedy, immoral. And you got all that money via ill means. They must be stupid and anti-American be
B) If you're a republican (Trump, Murdoch, Ted Stevens, et al.) your earned it from picking up yourself by your bootstraps, the American Dream. And they must be smart people, they have lots of money!
And vice-versa.
As an aside, I'm increasingly seeing spammy "Soros is an anti-american progressive socialist communist" comments on other low quality forums. Which is interesting considering his investments, wealth, views on Russian, path to citizenship, and interest in helping economies move away from communism into capitalism. Post-truth, I guess.
- cmiles74 10y agoI can't help being somewhat cynical and jaded on this one. I tend to think that people become wealthy through (1) inheritance, (2) something nefarious (greed, cheating, etc.) (3) working hard and the equivalent of winning the lottery, being rewarded for that hard work I believe that I could maybe relate to the people in category 3.
- gcb0 10y agoexcept that statistically you will never meet #3 but will meet tons of #2 and #1.
- gaius 10y agoEvery startup/dot.com millionaire/billionaire is a #3. For every one of them there are 10,000 others who are just as smart and worked just as hard but their company just didn't pan out for any number of reasons.
- gaius 10y agoOK I'll bite - how did the Clintons make their money? What goods did they sell? What services did they provide? Because they went from broke to $250M surprisingly quickly for career civil servants. I don't think there's anyone who doesn't know that Trump inherited his wealth.