The Poor Acquire Wealth: The Rich Expand Wealth
by This is why they believe they can get away with anything.
The Self-Made Rich
These believe that their wealth was earned, not by the fortunate circumstances into which they were born, and not by the breaks they caught on their way up, or by deceit, but by their own effort and will, among other personal merits. In other words, they believe that they are rich simply because they are awesome human beings.
If their wealth means to them that they deserve it, then you must be poor because you deserve poverty. Why do you deserve it? Because you didn’t work as hard as they did, or you are not as smart as they are. You are a lesser human being. This means that they can can treat you as such, that they can use a different set of ethics with you than they would with a true peer.
Myths about Wealth
Hard work alone does not get wealth, or Jim Crow-era sharecroppers and modern day Mexican illegals would be wealthier than your average American. Intelligence does not usually get you wealth in proportion to how smart you are or all doctors, astrophysicists, etc., would make more than all pro-athletes. Society has fostered this myth in order to get you to work harder in the hope of accomplishing it. Also to hide the unfairness of how things really work. As long as people believe that work and focus and knowledge is the key to a future free form poverty, they will strive toward those goals, and not look closely enough to see that they don’t work.
How Poor People Acquire Wealth and Rich People Expand It
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Breaking the rules
Stealing in the crassest most obvious sense, or selling contraband. This has worked for billionaire drug-lords, gun-runners and the men who made their money as prohibition-era bootleggers.
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Taking advantage of stupidity
Find an area of ignorance that many people share and exploit it. Invent (or steal) software that helps non-geeks use computers, or take advantage of somebody’s stupidity with regard to financial markets. Exploit the naïve and child-like who happen to possess something marketable.
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“Luck”
There is, of course, no such thing, but for the sake of my argument as an explanation for the fact that some prospectors struck gold and so many others never did, the same with oil-men in Texas and Oklahoma, and lottery winners.
The Heirs of Wealth
If you were born into wealth and are never forced to work, you never get a sense of how hard it is for people without that wealth to survive. If you never feel desperation you never feel empathy. Among the wealthy young with typical wealthy upbringings the sense of entitlement almost universal. Some amount of knowledge of how the world operates may come with time, but typically, the ignorance of youth, for them, usually involves being callous and childish. It often comes with a belief that wealth in itself is a guarantee of superior genetics, that somehow having money comes with merit, that it is a reward. Again, as with the self-made man, your poverty is your own fault.
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