Just Be Rich
I&#x27;m just gonna quote what I think is a very important part from the Graham piece itself<p>&gt;&quot;<i>People who don&#x27;t look any deeper than the Gini coefficient look back on the world of 1982 as the good old days, because those who got rich then didn&#x27;t get as rich. But if you dig into how they got rich, the old days don&#x27;t look so good. In 1982, 84% of the richest 100 people got rich by inheritance, extracting natural resources, or doing real estate deals. Is that really better than a world in which the richest people get rich by starting tech companies?</i>&quot;<p>And my answer to that question would be, arguably yes. Why? Because at least old money understands the concept of <i>noblesse oblige</i>. The real sinister psychological thing going on behind the Graham argument is that it&#x27;s not at all about meritocracy, it&#x27;s that this mentality of earned wealth completely rids the owner of any sort of responsibility.<p>The aristocrats and oligarchs of the olden days might have been corrupt, debauched and half-useless, but at least they knew it. This new, self-made entrepreneur class does not only think they have earned their money themselves, which as a sidenote is also kind of a fiction, but that they&#x27;re intellectually superior, morally superior and virtuous in ways that anyone else just can&#x27;t understand.<p>Old money might have ignored you and thrown a party, but Silicon Valley money wants to remake people in their images, they have a Protestant zealotry associated with their money that makes any oligarch look straight up sympathetic in comparison.<p>C.S Lewis:<p><i>&quot;“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron&#x27;s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be &quot;cured&quot; against one&#x27;s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.”</i>