plutherus: (Default)
Tons of money, right? We know they have billions and billions of dollars.

They have enough money to do pretty much anything they want. They have the power, just through choosing how to spend their money, to make profound changes to our world.

And what do they spend it on?

Well, a lot of it, tens of millions, at least, on lobbying.

Lobbying governments to roll back regulations to force the government to favor the already rich over those creating new companies with new ideas.

Lobbying against services for the poor. Lobbying against rights for persecuted minorities. Lobbying against scientific research.

Why?

I mean, they could do anything they wanted. With their money, they could directly fund their own Mars colony. They could wipe out diseases. They could start buying up and stabilizing corrupt regimes in third-world nations instead of lobbying governments to keep them destabilized.

Hell, if they had any imagination, and if making more money is the ultimate goal, they could be lobbying for increased expenditure on NASA and then piggy-back that into private asteroid mining and be bringing back enough resources to make themselves the worlds first trillionaires. And improve the scientific understanding and expansion into the cosmos of all mankind as a byproduct.

They could have giant statues of themselves on Mars, standing for a million years honoring them as great visionaries and beneficiaries of mankind.

But instead they choose to just make a bunch of people's lives a bit more miserable while they make themselves slightly richer, and then die and be forgotten.

And it's not just the Koch's. There's hundreds, possibly thousands, doing the same thing. Hell, think of what even a con man like Joel Osteen could do it he applied his imagination and charisma to something other than just defrauding gullible people.

And their followers. There are, in the United States alone, millions of people who admire and support these people. They look at them in awe and say, yeah, that's what I want to do when I grow up. If I was rich and powerful I could flaunt my power by spreading petty misery to other people, too!

Of course, those people will never *be* rich and powerful because they're part of the groups that the Koch brothers and others like them work so hard to keep down.

But they will never see it.
plutherus: (de la Mancha)
A friend of mine once made the point that part of what made medieval history so fucked up was that all the kings were like 16 years old.

Basically, you've got a bunch of emotionally immature adolescent males making decisions involving deploying armies, with little regard to the consequences because they'd never had to face them themselves.

There's no particular reason I am thinking of this now...

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plutherus

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