Why the Rich Are Awesome

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Check out the below video. It gives us a glimpse of the world’s tallest residential skyscraper and the three-story penthouse that sits atop it.

Great wealth has never bothered me—providing, of course, it was earned producing an ethical product or service and didn’t rely on cheating (i.e., fraud, extortion, crony capitalism, etc.).

Now here’s the rub. Despite the scourge of wealth inequality that great wealth naturally engenders, I never really questioned my detached fondness for great wealth. I mean, after all, shouldn’t the spectacle of the few living exquisitely while the many live drearily rankle my sense of fairness?

Part of the reason great wealth has never bothered me is genetic. I don’t have a hyperactive envy gene—I just don’t care that others have more. And I don’t have a hyperactive ego gene—I know I’m scum, and I’m happy being scum.

But once I moved beyond my genetic disposition and began grappling with my deductive powers, I came up with three reasons for my detached fondness for great wealth. Here we go.

Utility

Groovy Ranch cost $265,000 and helped fund the livelihood of a builder and a handful of tradespeople for four months. Central Park Tower will cost $3 billion by the time it’s finished later this year, and its owners have been funneling money to numerous construction firms and hundreds of tradespeople since 2015. And all that funneling has been made possible because there are enough rich people in this world who are willing to spend over $7,000 per square foot for an apartment in Manhattan.

The rich are good to have around, especially if you produce things that only they can consume.

And talking about things that only the rich can consume, a lot of the technology that we take for granted today is only around because of the rich. For example, I bought a 50-inch flat-screen tv two years ago for $190. When my rich cousin bought a 50-inch flat-screen way back in 2006, it cost him $7,500. Now a question. How does cutting-edge technology become commonplace if there aren’t first-adopters willing and able to pay dearly for it? If you answered it doesn’t, go straight to the head of the class. Television manufacturers needed a lot of flat-screen profits early on to justify all the toil and innovation that would be needed to vastly improve the production process and mainstream 50-inch flat-screen tvs. And you and I didn’t supply those profits. The rich did.

Finally, here’s another thing that makes the rich so useful. If refined culture depended on me and others like me, refined culture would have vanished years ago. The great unwashed just don’t frequent plays, lectures, museums, string quartets, art galleries, and fine restaurants enough to make these luxuries viable concerns. But the rich do. And because of this, refined culture is always around whenever a miracle strikes and I want a little more out of life than beer, Doritos, and reruns of The Trailer Park Boys.

Inspiration

How do you get water from the Delaware and Catskill watersheds to exit a shower head that’s on the 131st floor of some skyscraper on 57th Street in Manhattan? How do you get a turd deposited on the 131st floor of said skyscraper down to the ground level and then to a sewage treatment plant? And how do you get said skyscraper, which is super-thin and over 1,500 feet tall, to withstand the stress of hurricane-level winds? The engineering involved in Central Park Tower boggles the mind. And it’s a testament to what great things human beings are capable of.

I, of course, don’t have a one-percent brain. So I could never design anything as remarkable as Central Park Tower. But my ninety-nine-percent brain is far from useless. And that means I still have the ability to be more—providing, of course, I don’t get comfortable. And things such as Central Park Tower (thank you, rich people!) inspire me to be a little less lazy and a little less satisfied with whatever “achievements” I’ve made to date.

Appreciation

The older I get, the more I appreciate simple, unabashed competency. And the reason for this is depressingly straightforward: It’s becoming increasingly harder to find. The national debt is now nearing $27 trillion. We spend a trillion dollars a year on public education and our tech companies still have to import programming talent from abroad. There are over 40,000 homeless people in Los Angeles. In 2016, voters approved a $1.2 billion bond measure (Proposition HHH) to address this infamy. Well, to date, Los Angeles has committed roughly $800 million in HHH bonds to housing projects and has produced a paltry 46 housing units.

Quick aside: To be fair to Los Angeles officials, there are currently 19 HHH housing projects under construction (representing 1,260 units), 60 HHH housing projects in pre-construction (representing 4,150 units), and 35 HHH housing projects pending approval (representing  2,230 units). Over the next six years, Los Angeles should manage to produce an additional 7,640 housing units. That’s much better than 46 housing units in three years. But it’s still pathetic, giving the size of the problem and the amount of money earmarked to mitigate that problem.

And it’s not just the government that’s awash in incompetency. How many people were shot in Chicago last week? How many Americans are competently managing their health, finances, and interpersonal relationships? How many Americans take pride in their work, their appearance, and their social graces?

Here’s another video to check out. It shows the on-going site prep of the Tesla terafactory in Texas.

Now, I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at in the above video. All I know is that hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment are buzzing around the construction site and in little over a month, Tesla has managed to clear, level, and drain more than a thousand acres of raw land. By this time next year, Tesla will have a functioning factory spitting out thousands of vehicles. That’s simple, unabashed competency—courtesy of a rich-ass MFer with a lot of drive and a lot of vision.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that competency is the exclusive province of the rich. My middle-class brother-in-law, for instance, is a superb carpenter and his crown-molding skills are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Competency can be found at all socioeconomic levels. But to my anecdotal eye, it definitely skews toward the rich. Whenever I come across someone who has mastered his or her finances, brought excellence to his or her profession or trade, or elevated the condition of his or her community, that someone is more likely to be from the upper class rather than the working class.

Quick aside: To show what I mean by saying that competency skews toward the rich, ask yourself the following two questions. First, how many incompetent doctors or dentists have you come across in your life? Second, how many incompetent government bureaucrats have you come across in your life? In my adult life, I’ve sought the services of at least a dozen doctors and dentists. And I can’t think of one who was incompetent. They were all excellent. I did work, however, with hundreds of bureaucrats in my twenty-one-year career in a municipal highway department and I would be hard-pressed to name twelve who were competent. 

Final Thoughts

Okay, groovy freedomist, that’s all I got. What say you? Am I giving the rich far too much credit? Or is my detached fondness for them warranted? Let me know what you think when you get a chance. Peace.