James I agree with you it is no more complicated than very good luck or Fraud, take your pick the laws of chance preclude the former so it is usually the latter and this from John Ruskin, Unto this Last 1860, Critique of Classical Political Economy.
Pardon me. Men of business do indeed know how they themselves
made their money, or how, on occasion, they lost it. Playing a
long-practised game, they are familiar with the chances of its
cards, and can rightly explain their losses and gains. But they
neither know who keeps the bank of the gambling-house, nor what
other games may be played with the same cards, nor what other
losses and gains, far away among the dark streets, are
essentially, though invisibly, dependent on theirs in the lighted
rooms. They have learned a few, and only a few, of the laws of
mercantile economy; but not one of those of political economy.
Essay IV: “Ad Valorem,” section 77.‘Wealth, therefore, is “The possession of the valuable by the valiant”; and in considering it as a power existing in a nation, the two elements, the value of the thing, and the valour of its possessor, must be estimated together. Whence it appears that many of the persons commonly considered wealthy, are in reality no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes are, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth; and operating for the nation, in an economical point of view, either as pools of dead water, and eddies in a stream (which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people, but may become of importance in a state of stagnation should the stream dry); or else, as dams in a river, of which the ultimate service depends not on the dam, but the miller; or else, as mere accidental stays and impediments, acting not as wealth, but (for we ought to have a correspondent term) as “illth”, causing various devastation and trouble around them in all directions; or lastly, act not at all, but are merely animated conditions of delay, (no use being possible of anything they have until they are dead,) in which last condition they are nevertheless often useful as delays, and “impedimenta” ‘ (Unto this Last, 1860)
1 thought on “Government of the Poor, By the rich for the Corporations.”