Suppose You Were the Richest Man in the World

Suppose you were the richest man in the world.

Suppose you could have and do every single thing that you wanted, with no trouble, because you were the richest man in the world. If it’s physically possible to have, you could have it.

Your house is paid off. If you want another house, you can buy it. If you want a house that somebody else is living in, you can offer them a ridiculously high sum of money and they’ll probably sell it to you. If you want to stay where you are but change something about the house, you can do so at any time. New marble countertops. A luxurious tub with waterjets for your bad back. A swimming pool in the basement or on the roof. The sky’s the limit.

Your car is paid off, and you can buy another brand new one one in cash. You can buy a plane instead of a car if you’d rather. You can pay somebody to teach you to fly the plane, or you can pay a driver and a pilot to be ready at all times so you never have to operate a vehicle yourself. You can buy an RV and pay somebody to paint it pink just like the Barbie RV you had growing up. You can buy a yacht. You can park the yacht on your lawn, and if the police give you a ticket for parking a boat on the lawn, you can bribe city council to change the ordinance.

You never have to worry about your medical care. Sure, death comes for us all eventually, but if you get sick, you can get any treatment known to man. If you wake up in the middle of the night with a stomach ache and panic that it’s appendicitis, you’ll only be panicking that you’re afraid of the surgery: NOT that you’ll go in to debt paying for it.  You don’t have to plan to get your new glasses on pay day and tape the old ones together in the meantime. You can get those new plastic braces to fix your crooked teeth without looking like a teenager. If the doctor puts you on a special diet, you can afford to have that diet. You can see a naturopath, a chiropractor and a nutritionist. You can get aromatherapy at the spa and call it self-care.

You never, ever, ever have to stress over what to make for dinner. If you can think of a food, you can make it happen. If you like to cook, you can cook anything you want in your fancy kitchen, and the maid will do the dishes for you. If you don’t like to cook, the maid will take care of that too. Someone will deliver your groceries if you don’t like to grocery shop yourself. You don’t have to buy generic brands to save a few pennies unless you’d like to. You don’t have to wait until things are in season. You can have veal and foi gras. You can pay a scientist to synthesize something that tastes like veal and foie gras so that you don’t feel guilty about causing animals suffering. If you want mushroom pizza and also cheese pizza, but you don’t like the residue that the mushrooms leave on the cheese half of the pizza, you can order two different pizzas. You can buy the pizzeria.

Suppose you could have everything you’ve ever dreamed of, that money could buy.

If you’d like to pet a tortoise on the Galapagos Islands, you can make that happen. If you’ve always dreamed about being an opera singer, you can hire a voice teacher.  If you’d like to go back to college and get that art history degree, you can do it any time you want. If you’ve daydreamed about watching a play at the Globe Theater while dressed up like Queen Elizabeth the First, they’ll make it happen for you. You can buy your own island and hire an architect to make it look exactly like Myst Island.

If you see a beggar on the side of the road, you can buy that beggar a penthouse. If you hear about a famine somewhere on earth, you can hire a caterer and air lift those people a three course meal. If you find a crowdfund for somebody trying to get a special wheelchair, you can buy that person a wheelchair. If you are sad that a historic building has fallen into disrepair, you can buy the building and renovate it. You can buy all the land around the Amazon rainforest and plant trees on it. You can invest in carbon capture to save the world.

You could be an inventor– or, if you realize you’re not very clever, you could buy a corporation of inventors and pay them to invent cool things for you. You could pay engineers to create a stupid-looking truck based on your drawings, to sell to people who are normal-people-rich, but not richer than you, as a status symbol.

You could build a rocket and blow it up, and call yourself a scientist.

And all with no harm to you.

You could choose to do just about anything, and no harm would come to you, because you’re so rich.

And what you choose to do, is hurt people.

You decide you’d like to be the king of the United States government. You go into government offices with a team of teenage losers and start yanking at the levers of the US government without knowing what you’re doing. You make such an arrogant pest of yourself that everybody hates you while you’re at it.

We were on track to end AIDS by 2030, but now you’ve wreaked havoc on that deadline while claiming you didn’t do it. Poor people seeking food in a food bank can’t have any, because you took their food away to save money. And while you’re having your fun, you shut down USAID, ending access to medical treatment and emergency food aid for millions of people all over the world. Mind you, you’re the richest man in the world. If you thought that doing all of this just wasn’t the US government’s business, but better handled by a private charity, you could have written a check for all these programs yourself without any inconvenience to you instead of letting the government do it. But you chose to just get rid of them and leave nothing in their place, because it was fun to have that power. And you didn’t really save the government any money. And an estimated three hundred thousand people have died as a result, with no end in sight.

You decided to play a game that left hundreds of thousands dead, because you’re the richest man in the world.

I can’t imagine a hell deep or hot enough for such a man.

Woe to you rich, for you have received your consolation.