Do you follow Nicole Cliffe on Twitter? She had a recent thread about having worked in finance during the mid-2000s bubble and one of the things she said was that "All rich people are basically the same", e.g. whether you see yourself as liberal or not you're still profiting off the same extremely corrupt and amoral system sorry this is rambling but penny for your thoughts on the matter?

I’m afraid I can only do 1.5 social media platforms at a time and my Twitter stands like Ozymandias’s fuckin legs in the desert. “Look at this shit ye mighty and despair.”

I’m sure she knows her own Take better than I do, and it sounds like it was probably based in experience!

I think that everyone deserves a Good Quality of Life. That’s what I think. And I think we don’t need a huge amount more than that. I think an income of £100K in the UK should get you where you need to be in life, and that’s a few times more than the average wage, and having more is greedy. I don’t think anyone needs billions.

I think we don’t really have the ability to appreciate the gap that has grown between the classes, and how far behind the 1% have left us.

I know a few Old Money Folk and my absolute favorite of them all is this Elder Wizard of Academia who always does stuff like donating £200 to your friend’s GoFundMe just because. He used to drive this magnificently shitty elderly car that was an offence to ALL of the senses and leave it unlocked in random places in cities “because if someone wants to steal it they deserve to have it” and then he’d always look surprised and pleased when it was still in the same place. As soon as you got into this shitbox, it would start screaming opera at you and couldn’t be stopped. In short, exactly the kind of chaotic wealthy archwizard you’d want to grow up to be.

In terms of actual wealth, my old wizard is barely a flea on the back of the wealthbeasts that dominate our forests. He has enough, and he puts it where his mouth is, and he gives a lot of it away. But you look at him and you think “that’s what Rich is; that’s what Wealth is; a hideous thirty-year old tweed blazer, a car that shouts opera, taking me out to dinner, and five thousand books.” And you don’t mind. Elder Wizards are supposed to have SOME wealth. They need to have towers and telescopes and spinning glass instruments that pass through each other in weird intersections, while they sit in the middle eating soup out of a can. All revolutionaries should retire with a little grace and comfort. We don’t mind.

What we do mind is when someone with a thousand thousand times the wealth of an Elder Wizard hoards it and uses it to justify charging his employees less than minimum wage. That’s the wealth that kills people. That’s the wealth that is not compatible with kindness, and the wealth that can’t be earned and wasn’t fairly won. When your money makes more money than you do, and in fact it would be better off without you, then you can no longer say that you deserve to have it. I think the best thing is what JK Rowling did; use what you need, pay your taxes and give it away. JK Rowling was one of the richest women in the world and she gave it away and now she is not. Fair enough. Fair enough.

But sure, leave the Elder Wizards in peace. They’re not even a fraction of the 1%; they are barely on the same graph.

Hope you got your penny’s worth. I’m not sure what this answer is but I’m not really sure what the question was either.