I’m not afflicted with wealth envy, because I’m not a Communist. I do get upset, however, when the rich leverage their wealth to become still richer (as opposed to creating more wealth through productivity), or when people such as the late Senator Harry Reid become wealthy by abuse of their position, or by fraud (like this asshole, this asshole and this tart).
I’m also not envious of people who become rich by pure luck: lottery winners, or people like the Sultan of Brunei, whose country just happens to be sitting on an ocean of oil and natural gas — and who went and created a $5 billion (with-a-B) collection of cars, supercars, bespoke supercars and so on, as discussed here. I’m not upset that most of the cars have never been driven, or that they’re falling apart and becoming unrecoverable. Rich people do stupid shit, and that’s the way of the world.
As is the case with people who spend over $100 million to own apartments in New Yawk fucking City that they’ll never visit.
The difference between them and the idiotic Sultan is that their spending is an investment, whereas the Sultan’s spending is just money thrown away, as befits so much of this kind of thing in the Third World. The latter is similar to inheriting ten million bucks from Aunt Ethel, spending $1,000 on handmade chocolate bars, and never eating any of them. That kind of spending is actually symptomatic of a psychological defect — but still, I don’t care.
The point about those real estate buyers is that if the real estate market crashes, and it will, the value of their investment will plummet — and they still won’t care too much, because they have that much money. And remember the truism: in five generations (or less), all fortunes, no matter how vast, are dissipated.
Which brings me back to my opening statement: I really don’t care how much money people have, nor how it’s spent.
What does get up my nose is when governments do the same kind of thing as the Sultan of Brunei does: only with our money and not their own.