Hah! Inflammatory again. I like the rich fine. I’m not a commie or anything. Geez, guys, put down your second amendment protected arms.
What I really don’t like, is when people are so rich that they don’t feel the penalties for doing something wrong. This is most obvious with corporations. They get hit with lawsuits, or even fines for law breaking, but it doesn’t matter cause the fine is a fraction of the money they made doing whatever evil thing they did. A recent example would be Reebok’s EasyTone shoes. You might have heard of them. They are those stupid curved shoes that are supposed to exercise your butt or something, but actually do nothing, except maybe give you back problems. They got slapped for false advertising to the tune of $25M, but they’ve already made $1.1B, so what do they care?
Sometimes individuals are so rich they can do the same thing. The one that has me thinking of this is good ol’… really ol’… Rupert Murdoch. He recently decided to pay out £2M to the family of the girl who died, whose phone his newspaper hacked. He’ll give another £1M to some charities of their choice. Great. That’s a lot of money. Except he’s worth an estimated $7.6B. I’ve done the math for you, that’s .06315% he’s giving away. I know, it’s not really the same thing, since he doesn’t technically have to give anything, but just want to put it into perspective. You giving a bum a couple bucks is probably more generous, from a percentage perspective.
Sometimes the comparison between person and company is better as well. For Murdoch we can’t really know he made more than he’s giving away, since there are so many variables. There are, however, straight up hucksters like Kevin Trudeau, the author of books like, Natural Cures “They” Don’t Want You to Know About, who makes tons more money lying than he pays for being convicted of lying. When that sort of thing happens, you know the system is broken.
Rich people have it easy, and that’s sorta how capitalism is supposed to work. They can relax and not worry about losing their job or dinging their car door or paying for their kid’s tuition. They should, however, still have to worry about the law. It is pretty impossible to do perfectly, I know. And I’m also aware that they can’t just do anything that they want, hopefully. But I’m still pissed off when the system fails in this regard.
When I’m in charge penalties will be determined based on your assets and income. That goes for companies too.