The compassion of a millionaire and a billionaire

[packman]

SEAN HANNITY: I would assume being the Co-Executive Chairman of a group like the Carlyle Group, an investment firm managing 224 billion dollars, I would assume you're a pretty wealthy guy. Here's one thing I feel, we always seem to be pitting old vs. young, rich vs. poor and dividing Americans. One thing I've kind of figured out as I've gotten older and I kind of started out my life with nothing, David I don't know how much you know about me, but I've learned that we're all renters. In other words you think you own your home you think you own your car, you think you own your toys, whatever it happens to be. But the day you die somebody else is going to live in your house, drive your car, and ride around in your boat or whatever else you have in life. And money does not make you happy.

DAVID RUBENSTEIN: Money doesn't make you happy for sure, and the most unhappy people I've ever met are really wealthy people. Many billionaires I know are tortured souls because they realize money doesn't make them happy. What makes you happy is a happy family life, successful children, a healthy existence, so you're healthy. And also the most important thing is helping other people. Nobody gets as much pleasure out of life as then when you help other people. You help people who have poverty, you have people who have educational needs. That's the most important thing in life.


https://www.mediamatters.org/sean-hannity/sean-hannity-and-his-billionaire-guest-discuss-how-difficult-it-be-rich

Oh, the angst- Oh, the insight - Oh, the stupidity - Oh, but let's cut out health care, make them repay those student loans, let's do away with more school funding, etc.

[Baked Potato]

1. I'm sure they got all warm and tickly inside just talking about helping people.

“Helping other people” yawn.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. I think there is a biochemical reaction that takes place when you become rich

I've known people who have made themselves fairly wealthy or inherited businesses that made them wealthy. There's a strange, but definitely observable phenomena in them. Over time, they just become callous to non rich people, their compassion evaporates. They develop and over inflated sense of themselves in every way, that they're just super smart, that they work harder and smarter than everyone else, why can't everyone else work as hard as they did.

Never more evident than in this family I know in West Michigan. Their grand parents actually built a company from nothing, it was a landscaping and gardening company who sold plants and trees and did landscaping projects. The cobbled together a good living and owned several hundred acres of farmland for growing plants to sell. Well, that farmland ended up being a massive deal when the state decided to build a highway right through it, they negotiated and were paid $millions for land they would have never been able to sell otherwise.

And just like that a family dynasty was born. A generation later and the grandparents are gone and the entire family lives off the business while they pay their workers minimum wage. And each and every person in that family acts like they invented being business owners, it's absolutely sickening to be around them even for a minute and they treat their employees like garbage. My wife worked for them for a time and I couldn't stand to be around them and would pepper them with not so subtle insults whenever I could like, "Wow, ow great that you get to make a living off the family business, it's really tough to make it out there in the real world."

I know some good wealthy people too, but I think the lies that the truly wealthy have to tell themselves to justify their money rot their brains and their morality.