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Why get rich?
It takes an enormous effort and sacrifice to get rich to the point of Forbes-list status. There is a takeoff point in a fortune when it won’t diminish no matter what expense it is put to, I think.
In any case, what inspired this thought was Jim Treacher’s morning Substack. He notes that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI platform, now generates images, and he tries a few outrageous ones to see if they would be censored. Nope. Not yet, anyway. So he asks, if a painting offends you, do you sue the artist or the paintbrush?
Of course, we folks in the tribe of the gun have been on the receiving end of this for a century or more. Someone got shot? Take all guns away from people who aren’t evil, and we’ll all be safe!
Treacher speculates that Musk doesn’t care if someone offended by a Grok-generated image sues him. (Side note: I hope he paid the estate of RA Heinlein for use of “grok!”) That brings up the concept of being rich enough not to care what people think or do, what my kids refer to as fark-you money. Elon certainly has it. J.K. Rowling too. They are having fun poking pins into cultural balloons. I applaud.
But I wonder… how far are we from the point where you need fark-you money just to be able to have fun? I’ve spoken elsewhere about how damn joyless the Left is. That’s been a trope for decades (“How many feminists does it take to change a light bulb?” “That’s not funny!”). Do we need to lawyer up before we can make fun of something? That’s more than just depressing. That’s a state of affairs that we really can’t permit to happen. I hope it isn’t already too late.
Published in Culture
Indeed
It’s important to remember that “millionaire” doesn’t even mean what it meant 20 years ago, let alone 50 or 100.
I have said this for a long time. There are two kinds of people in this country. The ones that can afford lawyers and the ones that can’t. People that are in unions, corporations, and so forth are protected. The vast majority of people left over are on their own. It changes lives and behavior far too much.
Almost everybody is over-levered when they buy a house, now. This is what happens when you substitute central planning for not central planning,
Thanks Bishop – Carolla has it right.
Being a millionaire today is so unimpressive, and maybe so common, that the term has been redefined to mean someone who makes a million a year rather than someone who has $1000,000.00+ in the bank.
It applies to corporate income and “profits” too. You’ve got people like Kamala and FJB and others on the left crying about the “record profits” of corporations, but of course they HAVE TO BE “record profits” at least 20% higher than recently because of THOSE VERY PEOPLE and their inflation!
When Jimmy Carter was President, a corporation would have to pay taxes on its 10% profit — which was actually a 5% loss if you accounted for the 15% inflation rate, which the tax laws didn’t.
Not surprisingly, having to pay taxes on losses didn’t do these companies any good, and unemployment rates soared.
Democrats loved the fact that inflation was automatically pushing everybody into higher and higher tax brackets. But Ronald Reagan was able to bring conservative Democrats together with Republicans to index tax brackets to the inflation rate, something the Democrats have bitterly regretted ever since.
And it’s still not right, since official inflation never matches actual inflation.
I can’t believe I’ve never heard this before.
It’s so bad. Now we have so much debt they can’t stop lying about it or everything will fall apart.
This is the other thing. Let’s say they got serious about measuring inflation. Let’s say they said it at zero. It’s still just a phony central planning bogey. Far too many people are above whatever they are setting it at. Measuring it is a fraught concept.
I’ve mentioned a few times how I heard Ted Kennedy on NPR, with a compassionate tremor in his voice, urge us not to enact indexing. It was the last in a list of things he was urging us to do (or in this case, not do).
Awful.
Central planning is a hopelessly, stupid and corrupt thing to do, and not enough people get it.
Public goods only. Minimize inflation if you have to have government money.
I remember watching Reagan on TV, explaining that the Dems’ counterproposal, a one-time tax cut, would leave taxpayers in worse shape than his plan, after a few years.
Interesting. I don’t think I heard that. The WSJ was well aware of the difference, but I didn’t remember Reagan himself making that specific case.
We don’t manage inflation. It’s regressive taxation on the stupid and the poor. What percent make out on it? Maybe 10%. The only reason we need it is because of militarism.
Given that defense is so small a portion of Federal spending today, I find your comment puzzling.
He displayed two charts or graphs showing the future courses of the different plans.
That’s a good question. supposedly, you can’t be militaristic without the regressive inflationism. Central banks are about geopolitical power, and they all inflate.
Lincoln even figured out how to inflate when they didn’t have a central bank.
It would be better if we just traded gold for stuff all of the time. I have no idea what to do about it.
The Federal government would fall apart without inflation. The debt to GDP goes up constantly with inflation. It’s a stupid system.
I’m no expert, but …
If the government wants to increase spending, it either has to confiscate old money, i.e., collect taxes; or “print” new money, i.e., inflate the money supply.
In either case there is a shift from private consumption and investment, to public consumption and investment — and, of course, malinvestment or waste, which is consumption pretending to be investment, like Solyndra or Head Start.