A reader named Medusa wrote me and, to keep it short, explained that I shouldn’t believe people should be rich because the Bible is against rich people, that I was going to die a miserable, lonely old man with no one who loved me because I saved my money instead of spending it, and that after reading a profile I wrote based on Federal Reserve data of the Capitalist Class in the United States, she was starting to consider the possibility that the rich were nothing but oppressors who steal from others instead of producing on their own. This is my response to her.
In the nearly ten years I’ve been writing for one of the biggest financial publications in the world, I have never received a message that so grossly and inaccurately tried to surmise who I am and what my beliefs are. You not only missed the mark, it is as if you boarded a plane to London and ended up in Ulan Bator!
Your Premise is Faulty
Most of your mistake stems from a massive, gargantuan assumption you make that is a constant, underlying theme in almost every sentence you penned: You seem to subscribe to the belief that money equals happiness, or rather, spending money equals happiness. I say that because you basically attempted to eviscerate me for how I lived my early “salad years” working long hours, shopping at Army Supply stores for clothing, and refusing to buy a car. You suffer from the delusion that I must have deprived myself; almost as if you conjured images of Ebeneezer Scrooge counting money alone in a cold money house, too cheap to spring for another shovel of coal in the fire.
The thing is: I don’t require money to be happy. You apparently do. When I was spending less than $500 per month, it was one of the best times of my life. Aaron and I flew to California, spent a week at Disneyland, helped a friend buy a car on eBay, and drove it back to New Jersey, seeing the entire country from coast-to-coast. We performed on stage at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center and flew to Omaha to hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting. We spent our breaks donating time and labor to improve the run-down facilities of a local college, and we saw Elton John at Madison Square Garden. I got to work at one of the world’s biggest record labels and Aaron at one of the most famous television production companies. My afternoons were spent going to lectures, reading books, playing video games, and debating the influence Austrian culture had on the United States. We watched our friend compete in ice skating competitions, had fantastic nights out in New York, watched Shakespeare in the park and went sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. We went to Washington, D.C. and stood in the National Archives, looking at the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. We helped Christian groups run ice cream socials and gay groups throw drag balls to raise cash for AIDs treatments. We foolishly took on Chopin (thus far, he’s won) and drove to Delaware in the middle of the night to have donuts at a Krispy Kreme with some of our best friends.
We did more in those early years than most people do in a lifetime, very little of which required us to take out our wallets. Yet, you seem to malign that time as foolishly spent. You actually appear to believe the lie the consumer driven culture has fed everyone: To be happy, you must blow your cash today. New! Bigger! Better! Don’t deprive yourself! Hurry, while the sale lasts! After all, how could we have possibly been happy saving so much? We must just be greedy, lonely misers, right?
God has blessed me and I have lived an amazing, charmed life. I was born with an intellect that allows me to just “get” stuff with almost no effort. My parents, who are still married, were amazing, supportive, and constantly told my siblings and me that if we wanted to go to France and sell crepes by the side of the road, they would be behind us one hundred percent because it made us happy. Although in the early years, we didn’t have money, I cannot imagine wanting to “escape” my childhood or upbringing. (Like I said, you more than missed the mark – you aren’t even in the same country!) It is what made me who I am today.
Do You Even Know What Dividends and Interest Are?
You do realize what dividends and interest are? You seem to have a problem with me collecting them since I saved my money instead of spending it, so I’m going to guess you don’t really understand how they are generated.
You receive interest when you buy a bond and loan money to a company or government. Almost all school districts are paid for by issuing bonds to investors, who put up the money to build the school in exchange for interest. We could have used our money to go shopping or given it to friends and family. Instead, it is literally paying for construction crews to build classrooms.
Do you ride the subway? Use the roads or public transportation? Have you ever crossed any of the bridges going into Manhattan? Do you flush your toilet and use the sewer system? Yeah, bonds paid for all of that. Companies and governments approached savers like me and say, “We’ll give you 5% on your money instead of you spending it so we can help build the infrastructure we need to improve life or offer our product. What do you say?”
Likewise, dividends are an owner’s proportional cut of profits generated by a business. For example, instead of spending the money we saved, my family built a manufacturing plant in the Midwest that actually makes products here in the United States because we didn’t want to see it outsourced to low-cost Asian or Latin American countries.
The dozens of people that work there have jobs specifically because my mother chose to drive a 15+ year old car that looks like it came out of a junk yard. Would you have preferred she not build the company by reinvesting all those earnings, buying new equipment, and hiring more people and instead have driven a Mercedes this entire time? Sure, it would mean that they would all be out of work, but hell – you think we should live it up! I mean, we don’t want to be misers or anything!
What, Exactly, Do You Think Is Fair?
Is it just that you don’t think we should be entitled to earn a lot of money? What is your definition of a lot? By most of the world’s standards, anyone earning more than $3,000 per month before taxes is in the top 1% of wealth, literally. Can I criticize you for earning too much because you have 1,000x more than some poor family born in a third-world country? Of course not, because you don’t think you’re rich, even though you are among the richest on the planet.
How about the early years of my family’s company, when it took more than $40,000 per month just to keep the lights on and the doors open? If we didn’t hit those targets, it meant we didn’t eat or we risked bankruptcy. Do you think that we deserve no payoff for giving up the money early on and taking that risk? Should have have put our own family in jeopardy out of some perverted sense of altruism? We do all the work, take all the potential downside, save all the money but don’t get the rewards, right? What kind of twisted, sick, selfish world is that?
If you are so altruistic, how about you share with your neighbors? Seriously, right now go take the television, computer, and lamps out of your home, knock on your neighbor’s door and give them as a gift. I realize you live in Brooklyn (I can see your physical location from the server logs), so you may not have a car, but if you do, get rid of that, too. Seriously, go “share” with your neighbors.
Which Is It? Make a Decision.
The real problem is you either criticize me for having too much and collecting dividends and interest all day or not spending enough and being a miser. I’m either a selfish prick because I now buy $300+ cologne and drive a Jaguar or I’m a moron because I chose to wait until I could pay cash for these things and deprived myself during the early part of my life. Which is it? You can’t have it both ways.
I Love the Middle Class – I Despise Victim Mentalities
I don’t hate the middle class or the working class (which is one of the reasons I’m lobbying so hard for Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Protection Agency).
What I despise with an almost visceral passion is the victim mentality, like the Dairy Queen Franchise owner who wrote me and blamed the parent company for her woes when I showed her that her family could have had $10+ million on only $10 a week.
Money isn’t hard. I never said being rich makes someone superior or better, but it does make their life easier. I wish someone had written this stuff for me so I didn’t have to figure it all out on my own. That is why I explain how it is possible to make money from passive income sources. But you mistake passive for lazy because you didn’t bother to actually read what I wrote, you merely skimmed a handful of articles and assumed it was all about the money. The goal of passive income is to spend more time with friends and family or have the experiences you want, as I have repeatedly said.
A perfect example is an iPhone app developer. Someone creates a game for the iPhone, never touches it again, and for that big upfront investment, gets to collect royalties for years. According to you, this is some demonic oppression of the poor! Yet, if I take out my iPhone, buy the game, and spend hours playing it, enjoying it, and having fun, I gladly exchange cash for the experience, Apple gets money for its employees, and the developer gets a stream of passive earnings.
If this is really your stance, then I think you should take up a jihad against Bejeweled. The game cost the developer only $40,000 to create and yet he has made more than $350 million in revenue off of it, pouring the cash into his tiny little video game company. Clearly, the fact that tens of millions of people enjoy his creation everyday doesn’t matter to you. He’s nothing but a bastard, capitalist oppressor, right?
By that same token, if I build a townhouse so I can earn passive rental income, I’m taking advantage of the young doctor who lives there during his residency, right? I mean, he didn’t want to buy a house and the fact I chose to use my savings to hire a construction crew and provide him shelter in exchange for a monthly check that we both benefit from is an inconvenient truth.
Dividends and interest always come from something. They only exist if actual people think the product or service is worth paying for, such as you getting an ice cream cone. Is the owner of the ice cream shop wrong because he generated dividends from you? Is the fact that you gladly gave up your money in exchange for a tasty ice cream treat factor into that decision? I mean, it was a free exchange of goods between consenting adults. Yet, because he used his savings to build the store and his net worth is now higher because of that decision, he must be doing something wrong by your logic.
It Is a Series of Steps
Every decision we make in life gets us one step closer to where we want to be or one step further away. As I’ve said, I need to lose a bit of weight because I choose to eat really well at nice restaurants. Other people die young because they choose to smoke. Those who invest their money in products or services that benefit mankind, such as buying municipal bonds in the New York City subway system so it can be built and save the average family money compared to buying cars or using taxis, end up with a higher net worth. You can’t demand the benefit of their savings (the subway system) and then bitch about the fact they have more income than you.
That is what it sounds like you are doing. If not, I’ll trust that it was just a misunderstanding because I know it is difficult to convey tone over text. Otherwise, I find it extremely difficult to understand how you take umbrage with the fact that 90 out of every 100 millionaires in the United States made their wealth through hard work, spending less than they earn, and putting the money back into the economy to provide goods and services for civilization. I say that is infinitely preferable to the unjust system that was in place circa 1790 when 90 out of 100 millionaire Americans inherited their wealth, mostly in the form of slave plantations passed down from father to son.
The bottom line is that anyone who even has even the faintest notion of me or has encountered me realizes that I don’t care about the money at all (it was only a few days ago I wrote the article here explaining that your goal is not to amass money for its own sake but to design your life!). What I care about is building something that matters, watching it grow, and competing with others; playing a real-life version of Monopoly. What I give to charity or how I spend my funds is none of your business any more than it is my place to know which sexual positions you and your significant other enjoy. That may be blunt, but I think it puts it in perspective.
P.S.
P.S.: I’m not even going to touch your religious or familial assumptions with a ten foot pole because there is no benefit. All I will say is, I make it a general rule not to talk about anything unless I’ve read the entire document, which is why I read every page of the Bible several years ago, cover to cover. The Bible contains over 1,600 verses concerning money, building wealth, and growing rich for your family, including 500 that include those words verbatim. Satan, or the Devil, appears only 57 times. Poverty only became associated with Christianity in the dark ages when the Catholic Church (which was the only church at the time) convinced people that they should be poor for God but, of course, turn over all their treasure to the church. The corruption during this time was horrific.
The Book of Proverbs explains that wisdom comes from the Lord and wise men have treasure and precious oils in their home as the result of studying knowledge (Proverbs 24:3-4). Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were obscenely rich, as were David and Solomon (who was so rich his servants refused to use silver because it was worthless (1 Kings 10:21).
Also, can you please provide a single verse that confirms your notion that Jesus Christ was poor? Even one? At his birth, the three wise men brought him gold, frankincense, and myrrh, three of the most valuable items in existence at the time (Matthew 3:1-12)! The monetary equivalent of those items would be several million dollars because, unlike today, it wasn’t easy to secure and transport them over long distances. It was this money that the family would have been able to live off of during Christ’s childhood when they had to go into hiding in Egypt to escape from King Herod. So, within the first few moments of life, Jesus Christ was given a trust fund.
He was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, who was his friend and one of the richest men in the ancient world, the soldiers cast dice to see who would get to take his coat when he was crucified (John 19:23-24) because it was “seamless”, as the original text reads… you don’t fight over a $5 t-shirt but you do fight over an Armani coat with couture stitching, and the oil that Mary poured on Jesus’ feet was valued at approximately 1 year’s wages according to the book of Mark. To put that in comparable relative terms for the United States, he had a bottle of perfume poured on him that was worth $50,000 today.
Also, why did Christ tell the rich young ruler to give up his money but not his much richer friend, Joseph of Arimathea? Because the rich young ruler came to Jesus asking specifically what he needed to do based on his own heart – he had kept all the commandments and honored his parents. Christ saw that he loved his money more than God and basically offered him a spot as his disciple (“Give up all you have and follow me” to paraphrase). The Son of God was offering this man a job and yet he rejected Christ for the sake of his bank balance. Clearly, Joseph of Arimathea didn’t have that problem because a comparable demand wasn’t made of him.
It is possible for a homeless person to be more consumed and in love with money than a billionaire. Greed and avarice have no relationship to your net worth. It comes down to what you value more than anything else. In my life, money came last because I wanted to be free to experience certain things, spend my time how I wanted, and be generous. Cash was the mechanism through which I did that. I’m giving people the means yet you think that money is the ends. It sounds like you have far too high an emotional investment in money, how it is made, and who has it. In my case, money does not now nor has it ever had any emotional power over me, even when I was young and broke.
The point is, it is not a sin to be rich and it is not a sin to be poor. It is merely preferable to be rich, all else being equal, because most of the verses say that it is a byproduct of being wise and seeking knowledge. It is, in other words, an accent to a life well lived, not the meaning of life itself. If a family member needs medical help, you can provide it. If your child wants to go to a better school, you can give them that leg up on the competition.
For you to make a statement that Bible is against rich people leads me to the conclusion that you clearly haven’t read it. Instead, you are taking what American culture, left over from the reformation when the Catholic Church split down the middle, told you is in the Bible (it’s like those people who are convinced Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because of the gays – because, after all that is what you are taught in America – when the scripture itself clearly lists the reasons for judgment in Ezekiel). It’s not that hard. I hate laziness and to not bother to read a book you quote is nothing but sloth. You know, in the 19th century, Americans argued over how many angels would fit on the head of a pin? People never actually bother to study the thing they supposedly are staking their soul upon …
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I'm a private investor who loves architecture, furniture, clothes, history, philosophy, books, cooking, and music as much as I do finance. 
