Billionaire complaining about people complaining they are poor
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I thought this was a joke at first but apparently not.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/27/charlie-munger-stop-complaining-about-wealth-inequality-life-quality.html?__source=sharebar|email&par=sharebar
It concerns a billionaire parasite by the name of Charles Munger. It seems Munger is perplexed by the fact that people are much more discontented today than they were in the past even though they are much better off (according to him). Munger (who is 98 years old) puts it like this
“It’s weird for somebody my age, because I was in the middle of the Great Depression when the hardship was unbelievable.”
If hardship makes you happy – or at any rate, happier – we look forward to him giving away his unearned millions to charity and moving into a council flat. Good luck with paying the fuel bills on yer state pension Mr Munger!
Not that he is likely to give away his unearned millions – actually nearly 2 billion – to charity anyway. According to Wikipedia, he hasn’t even bothered to sign up to that well-known philanthrocapitalism scam initiated by his fellow parasite, Bill Gates, called the “Giving Pledge”:
“Munger has not signed The Giving Pledge that was started by his partner Warren Buffett and co-director, Bill Gates, and has stated that he “can’t do it” because “[he has] already transferred so much to [his] children that [he has] already violated it.”
LOL. Some charity!
The icing on the cake was this daft comment from him complaining to the effect that “envy is a driving factor for too many people today”. It amuses me when capitalists and pro-capitalist workers go on about socialists just being “envious of capitalist success”. It never seems to occur to them that to be “envious” of a capitalist implies one wants to be just like that capitalist too and that consequently, one does not really want to get rid of capitalism at all. That makes one a non-socialist, not a socialist.
Envy is the great lubricant of capitalistic aspirations, a means of oiling the wheels of commerce. It is not envy that socialists feel at the sight of capitalist luxury but anger – anger at the exploitation of workers required to concentrate such huge wealth in so few hands. Envy belongs to a capitalist mindset. Imagine what would become of the capitalist advertising industry if it were to refrain from trying to incite or stimulate people’s envy!
A capitalism without consumerism, and consumerist values is unthinkable
He didn’t say hardship makes you happier. As far as the facts go he is quite right. There is no denying it was tougher for workers in the past.
Hardship today is spending a week in Spain rather than the usual ten days.Chelmsford – “Hardship today is spending a week in Spain rather than the usual ten days.”
If you do live in Chelmsford, you might not be best placed to comment about poverty. Chelmsford is ranked 256 out of 326 local authorities in England on overall deprivation (where 1 is the highest level of deprivation).
In my work life I have encountered many people living in abject poverty, no heat, light, food, etc. Although I have seen extremes of poverty in urban areas, the level of poverty in rural areas is often much worse.
Having worked in rural north and west Northumberland for many years, I found the level of rural poverty is often under reported and missed in official statistics.
Probably the worst housing conditions I have come across are those rural workers who are tenants of the big country land owners, who often work for the same land owners. Complaining about housing can lead to losing your home and your job, a real problem when both are scarce. Similar conditions often apply to many of the tenant hill farmers, scratching a living from rasing sheep and giving most of it back to the landowner in rent.
“Bezos is one of a number of the super-rich that has faced criticism in light of their growing wealth — and as stated, COVID-19 didn’t do much to quell the financial growth of these moguls. If anything, most reports suggest that the rich have just gotten richer, and the poor have just gotten poorer.
Even Microsoft founder Bill Gates, himself one of the longtime richest people in the world, has weighed in on whether people should be able to accumulate this type of wealth. “For the first time in my life, people are saying, ‘Okay, should you have billionaires?'” Gates told Forbes. “If you really implemented something like that, the amount you would gain would be much less than the amount you would lose.”
The issue of extraordinary wealth remains mired in controversy. However, financial indicators point to the vast accumulation of riches continuing, and research shows that the era of the world’s first trillionaire may only be a few years away. ”
https://theweek.com/finance/1019328/the-rise-of-the-worlds-first-trillionaire
Bijou Drains – I always recall my father angrily criticising some in his farm-labourer family and many other folks he knew for touching the forelock to their “betters”.
For a very long time in Scotland, workers in the countryside would always vote Tory. (Countryside Alliance?)
He had an ingrained hatred for the affluent “gentleman farmer”.
He recommended I get a copy of Thomas Johnston’s Our Noble Families to discover the truth of their noble history which I eventually did get hold of with a degree of difficulty because when he became a respectable Labour MP and Minister, Johnston did his best to destroy copies of his book.
Amazon states “ When Tom Johnston’s book, Our Scots Noble Families, first appeared in 1909 it caused a sensation.
The man who was later to become wartime Scottish Secretary of State and first chairman of the North of Scotland Hydro Board revealed how many Scots landed families inherited privileges through lands taken by force or fraud. “The title-deeds are rapine, murder, massacre, cheating or Court harlotry,” wrote Johnston.
“They (Scotland’s landowning elite) scorned any principle of morality; they gambled and murdered and robbed and foisted numerous illegitimate lusts on the granaries of the common people.”
Johnston claims that the Dukes of Hamilton, Scotland’s premier peerage, owe their wealth to mining royalties to which they had no entitlement.
The Gordons of Barra, who evicted islanders in the potato famine of 1851 when the kelp industry failed and tried to offer the island to the government as a penal settlement, excited Johnston’s wrath. “The first Barra Gordon appears to have been one of the most inhuman rascals that even Scottish Land history takes cognisance of. Beside him Nero was an innocent babe.” Their namesakes in the North East were a “nest of public robbers.”
And the Sutherlands, whose annual revenue from land in the north of Scotland and elsewhere even in 1874 was some £141,000, had a history of “cruel murders and blatant thievings”.
Despite being banned by some booksellers, Our Scots Noble Families sold 120,000 copies.”Our Comrade, Alwyn Edgar’s incredible book “Clans and Clearances – The Highland Clearances Volume 1” provides a forensic examination of the whole process of the expropriation of the highlands and their people’s pauperisation, in a similar way that Marx did in Chapter 27-29 of Capital Vol 1, regarding the same process in England and other parts of Western Europe.
It’s ironic that the Bolsheviks and their hangers on see the process of “de kulakisation” of the Soviet Union as a great achievement of Lenin, Trotsky and their murderous band.
The Bolsheviks expropriated (stole) the land for the state capitalists more ruthlessly and viciously than any of the private capitalists ever did.
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