“Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.”
- Honore de Balzac
Rich jerks in space went viral on Facebook a few weeks back.
Except that most of the memes used a less polite word for jerk.
One said, “My mom watched Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. I saw the guy who killed bookstores float around in space.”
No one told Elon Musk, Richard Branson or Jeff Bezos that, as with valor, the better part of riches is discretion. There’s a reason for the expression obscenely wealthy. Wise guys of yore understood this. Mafia dons worth millions ducked the heat by leading quiet lives in tiny row houses in blue-collar neighborhoods.
The idea was to not draw attention to yourself and thus to limit the number of people inquiring about how you made your money. When brash, young mobsters starting flaunting their cash and flouting authority, the law had no choice but to bring down the heavy.
No one likes a braggart or a show-off. Ask the former president. Perhaps even he has learned this by now. Savvy smart guys act dumb. Masters of the universe succeed by playing the pauper. Don’t show your hand if you needn’t. At best, leave them guessing.
But I appreciate the billionaire blast-off for what it reveals better than any other stunt the boy wonders could have pulled off: What capitalism is all about.
Capitalism is the rocket. Ninety-nine percent of its length is fuel launching one or two people, who sit atop it at the rocket’s very tip, into the stratosphere. The rest of us are the fuel. As the few people atop the rocket escape gravity, the rest of us are jettisoned, breaking off the ship and falling back to earth.
The rocket of untethered capitalism does not exist to lift us all to a better place. The rocket is there to project a select few to a place beyond the reach of the rest of us. Like the booster rocket, the rest of us are expendable and easy to replace.
Whenever the dot-com bubble or the mortgage bubble or the real estate bubble or any other economic frenzy goes bust – as all of them inevitably do – the news commentators are bound to show us the pitiful victims, the people in soup lines or some desperate mom holding big-eyed, hungry children looking all the world like a Dorothy Lange photo.
What the media need to show next time is the filthy bastard who became deliriously rich on the scam, then cashed out before the bubble burst, knowing full well that it would. In terms of wealth, that son-on-a-bitch was shot into outer space and will never have to touch down again on planet Earth where the rest of us still toil for a living.
When he is hungry, he’ll phone his cook, who will bring him food. When he’s tired, a private masseuse will rub his shoulders. When he’s feeling down, he’ll order up a bevy of buxom beauties to stop by for drinks.
Next time you’re thinking that the Magic Hand of the Marketplace levels the playing field, that everyone gets what they deserve, and that time wounds all heels, take a good, long look at these bastards and understand they got where they are today because you probably served as the rocket booster.
You did if you supported tax breaks for the rich. You did if you backed cuts to food stamps or job-training programs. You did if you supported corporate subsidies or voted for shill politicians who passed them into law.
But as your part in the rocket launch of capitalism, you fell back to earth, just an empty canister of spent fuel, while the rich jerks in the space capsule at the top of the rocket shot into the stratosphere, never to return.
That’s capitalism in its purest form. Its success relies on suckers below believing they’re along for the same ride as the bastards at the top.