thats how I am with consumerism and buying stuff now. in the sense of like. you know what. I can still read books ya bastards and I don't need most of whats being sold.
Imagine every single minion stopping to work for him. Even the bankers. He'd be stranded and helpless. No family member (if there still are any) would help him for free.
Okay lets brainstorm, they are all parasites on society, they are not more worthy than anyone else, but "king" has a sort of good vibe to it for many people so...
Something along Robber Baron? But again, baron is kind of cool.
Gangster? Too cool.
Oligarch is for russians right?
Child prince, too demeaning.
Hyper burglar, too complicated.
Thief sounds good IMO but they steal so much, and in history we've always been facinated with oeople being able to do that (kings, dragons, and actual thiefs).
Bureaucratic parasites? Because they steal the work by shuffling the papers. Also doesn't sound "cool".
Accountant or clerk seems to be what they actually are, cooking the book on the whole society.
i was thinking about this the other day. i know the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is disputed but i think there must be something to linguistic relativism. like, in english words describing wealth are all tied to "worthiness", and we talk about being wealthy as being more good.
in my language words describing wealth are all tied to effort: the ability and/or will to do something is "förmåga", and if someone is wealthy they are "förmögen", which i'm not entirely sure of the conjugation for but intuitively i read it as "has expended effort". this is a more neutral term, and our class divide has historically been much shallower than the anglophone world. of course this is mostly due to different social systems but... why were they put in place ho begin with?
I don't want to argue against the correctness of the sentence in English (I think you're correct with that). I'm just uncomfortable by the conflation of two meanings. This makes:
"He spent his last penny"
technically the same as
"He is worth nothing"
So a rich person is "worthy", which also means they are good, have achieved good things, and we are happy they exist. A poor person is "unworthy" and we can throw them away like garbage. That conflation is a problem to me.
Ultimately, there can be only one, which is why J. P. Morgan scared Andrew Carnegie quite a bit. They just didn't get to the part where Morgan would actively bring Carnegie to ruin.
The rich are tasty even to other rich, though they'll eat the rest of us first because we can't defend ourselves or escape.