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It’s time to grow up, Troy, the world is unfair.
But as a society, we could try to make things more fair for everyone. Why should some people never have to worry about money just because their parents or some ancient relative was able to gain enough wealth to support their descendants for multiple generations? And forget about fairness or otherwise, it simply isn’t in the best interests of society. You harp on about how the world can only function correctly by following a strict system of capitalism. Where everyone has the same opportunities to make the most of themselves, ensuring that the most capable will rise to the top to build the new businesses that make society as a whole richer. And at the same time you believe that families should be able to hoard wealth for generations. So ensuring that many less able people start at the top, while making it harder for more able people to rise to the top, as the free movement of money is actually restricted. You’re a hypocrite, Hugo.
I imagine to someone not well-schooled in economics, what you say might sound perfectly logical, but the reality is that it’s simply nonsense.
It’s not nonsense. Let me illustrate the problem for you. Imagine a village 12,000 years ago, just as humans were starting to form into communities that use farming, rather than hunting and gathering, as their main source of food. For simplicity, our village of one thousand people consists of 100 families and each family has an equally sized piece of land, which they can use to grow food for their own use. Some eight miles away from the village, on the coast, is a town of three thousand people who largely rely on the sea for food, as they have less fertile land around them to grow crops. At first, every family in the village struggles to work out the best way to farm their land to maximize the amount of food they produce. It’s likely they’d all still need to hunt and gather food to ensure they have enough for the whole year. The food that they grow and hunt and gather is the equivalent of income. They use it solely to ensure that they are able to live from day to day, year to year. With time, though, at least some of the families start to generate more food than they need to feed themselves. Once a family is able to generate surplus income, more than they need to cover their day-to-day needs, they can start to generate wealth. So let’s imagine that one of these families, the Burns family, along with some others, starts generating surpluses of food, year after year. They transport their surplus food to the coastal town and sell it, meaning that year after year, their land is generating enough food to feed themselves and creating more wealth, which means they always have money available to fall back on if they should suffer an occasional bad harvest. More than that, though, they can use their wealth to buy pieces of land from other families in the village, which is exactly what some of these families do.
So what, you’ve got a thing against people investing in property?
No, not at all, if you let me continue, I’m getting to my point. After the first generation of farmers passes on their land, the second generation of the Burns family farmers and nine other families now own two pieces of land each, while 10 families, including the Simpsons, have sold their land and are reliant either on working for other farmers or finding other ways to earn food. The first generation of farmers all started on a level playing field, but 10 families in this second generation have got a head-start, while 10 families have no land at all. That head-start means that the Burns family and nine other families are able to generate even more surplus crops that they can convert into wealth. And that wealth can be used to buy even more pieces of land. However, it’s also still possible with this second generation for some families who own just one piece of land to grow enough surplus crops to generate enough wealth to buy an additional piece of land, too.
Are you sure you’ve not got a thing against property investment? It’s just you seem to be a bit fixated on it, if you don’t mind me saying?
Are you actually paying attention to what I’m saying, Hugo? I’m not trying to make a point about property investment. Now, let me summarize the situation after the second generation. The Burns family and nine other families now own four pieces of land each, while five second-generation families were able to grow enough surplus to buy a second piece of land each. That means we have 50 families who still own one piece of land, but now 35 families own no land at all and either have to find work with other land owners or find another way to earn money to buy food. Let’s move forward to the third generation of families. Again, 15 families have a head-start, though for 10 of those families, like the Burns family, it’s an even bigger head-start. But now the Simpsons are one of 35 families who are starting out with nothing. By the end of this third generation, the Burns family and nine other families now own eight pieces of land each, for a total of 80 pieces, and five other families own the remaining 20 pieces of land. In just three generations, because families can hoard their wealth across generations, just 15 families from the village own any land and the other 85 families own none of the village land. Those 15 families have captured all of the village’s surpluses and, in so doing, have captured the village’s only way to generate wealth. If you’re born into the Simpsons family or one of the other 84 families with no land, it doesn’t matter if you’re a better farmer or businessman than someone born to a family with land, because they have the advantage of wealth giving them a head-start. Anyone who is born into a family of millionaires has a much better chance of dying a millionaire than someone born into a poor family.
That’s just the luck of the draw, oops, almost forgot, ahem, I mean God makes these decisions for us. Apparently, I’m meant to be trying to appeal to the religious right by pretending to be a devout and God fearing Christian.
It’s very convincing, Hugo. Anyway, you capitalists pretend that individuals should be primarily responsible for their own economic success and that’s why society shouldn’t be wasting money on social support. But at the same time you all want your own kids to have an unfair head-start over everyone else. It’s just nepotistic socialism.
Not at all, Troy, I absolutely believe in the importance of individuals creating their own success and wealth.
That’s easy to say, Hugo, but if you really believed in capitalism, you’d want the most brilliant entrepreneurial minds to have the freedom to create the new businesses that will ensure the strongest and healthiest society possible. You know Festoon Bunting, the owner of AllThingz, don’t you?
That nasty little sleaze. If he doesn’t get a grip on the editorial policy of his newspaper, once I’m First-Best-Guy, I’m going to take the Sunday edition of his paper, roll it up loosely and shove it right up his where the sun don’t shine.
Okay, but…
Sideways.
Okay, but…
And that’s if he’s lucky.
Okay, but my point is that he borrowed 245,573 spondoolicks from his parents to start AllThingz and the company was recently valued at 1.922 trillion spondoolicks. That’s an increase of 777,773,000%. Your mom left you 416 million spondoolicks and I read last week that if you’d just put your money into a standard bank account, you’d be half a billion spondoolicks richer today than you actually are. Just imagine if you’d increased your wealth by 777,773,000% like Festoon Bunting. You’d have 3,235,536,096,000,000 spondoolicks right now. You could pay off Everything’s national debt and still have 3.2 quadrillion spondoolicks left. This clearly illustrates my point that inheritances aren’t just unfair, they’re…gosh, is it getting hot in here…they’re anti-capitalistic because…er…umm…they make it harder for truly talented entrepreneurs…to…ahm…get access to money…gulp…because so much wealth is tied up with the untalented children…golly…of brilliant entrepreneurs from the past oooeeeeeek!
Are you okay, Troy? You seem jumpy.
No, yes, umm, yes, I’m fine, thank you, Hugo. You just startled me, that’s all.
Oh, I am sorry, Troy, I just happened to notice that you were backing into a plinth that my priceless Krinkle Dynasty vase is displayed on. If I hadn’t quickly thrust my powerful arm past you to catch it, it would have shattered to smithereens on the floor. That would have made me sad. You don’t want to make me sad, do you, Troy?
Oh, no, absolutely not. I’m so sorry, Hugo, I can’t believe I was so clumsy as to back into the plinth like that.
Now, why don’t we change the subject a bit, Troy?
Gosh, that really is a great idea, you know, I can’t even recall what it was we were talking about now.
Well, you were spouting some naive nonsense about society not offering a level playing field for all its members to find success and fortune. But the reality is that there is a level playing field. Anybody can apply to appear on Sheep Pit and pitch their idea to brilliant entrepreneurs like me. I’ve invested my own money in loads of these ideas and helped build multiple thriving new businesses that help move all of society forward.
Businesses like the Chocolate Cafetiere Company, perhaps?
Everyone likes chocolate and who doesn’t need a caffeine boost every now and again.
Not the most robust of products, though, was it?
So it was a single-use product, like sanitary towels.
A single-use and a puddle of chocolatey coffee.
Which just helped us justify our complementary product range.
You mean the chocolate mugs, don’t you?
Indeed, but I sense you’re missing the big picture here, Troy. Us businessmen don’t invest in ideas, we invest in people. And trust me, I invested an awful lot of myself into the Hevenly triplets. Boy, those girls knew how to party.
No doubt it hit you hard then when Brandi took her own life, Candi had that horrible fall into rampant drug use and Randi was committed to a long-term mental health institution after working with you.
Of course it did, though if I’m being completely honest, I feel like I got my money’s worth.
Which is probably not a claim you’d make about the Sugar Paper Umbrella Company, I suspect.
Again, it’s about investing in people and, well, Bubbaloo Divine, divine by name and divine by nature. And don’t forget, after the business crashed and burned, she had the balls to retrain. She’s one of the country’s leading prosecutors right now.
Oh yes, which segues us quite neatly into the Pigwoo.
Now the Pigwoo was brilliant. We could all see that that self-balancing hoverboard with handlebars was the future of human transportation. The technology in that was truly mind-blowing and had the promise to massively reduce pollution generated by human travel.
But Hugo, it didn’t hover, she just kept showing it to you and the other sheep from clever angles. We at home were all screaming at the TV screen, ‘the thing’s got wheels.’
It was a prototype and they’re still very popular at airports.
Not as popular as airplanes.
But Troy, how many times do I have to say it’s about the people. Lizzie Dizzy-Busy looked like she’d been put together by Professor Frankenstein using the best bits of all the world’s supermodels, only with neater stitching than in the movie and not green either.
Which may explain how she came to be…um…the third Mrs Sensationist?
Yep, the third and one of my personal all-time favorites too. Which made the divorce all the more painful, but what could I do after her conviction for fraud with a 15-year prison sentence?
A case prosecuted by Bubbaloo Divine with you as the star witness, if I recall.
I never felt good about that, Troy, but justice must be served or society will descend into anarchy. You have to remember that I invested an awful lot of money into the Pigwoo self-balancing hoverboard. She swore to me and the other investors that she’d developed absolutely world changing new gravity defying technology. Yet here’s the crazy Twilight Zone moment, and trust me, Troy, you’re probably going to struggle to get your head around this. It’s truly unbelievable, but if you ever get to look at a Pigwoo close up and from just the right angle, the thing’s got wheels!
Strewth! Oh well, at least you seemed to show some concern for the climate with your investment in Pigwoo.
Any successful businessman needs to understand what’s important to the market, Troy.