Yesterday I made the mildly
complicated joke that the amount paid for a single soccer player in
Europe was outrageous because the same amount of money could have been
used to buy a Rothko painting. But today they are
installing an art exhibit of work by students at my library. These are
by first graders up through high school students and look to be mostly
drawings in colored pencil. It's a nice show. What they've done is taken
drawings by the little kids and had the teens
do their own more sophisticated version of that same drawing. Then the
two are hung next to each other.
They haven't quite finished
putting everything up but it looks to be maybe a hundred pieces of art.
And of course that's the real travesty of paying a hundred and eighty
million dollars for a soccer player or a single
piece of art: With that much money we could afford to buy the ten best
of these drawings. I think the artists would have a hard time refusing
our offer when we're talking 18 million dollars a shot. Of course, then
we'd have to figure out how to afford framing them. That's gonna be
extra.
I know the real thing with money like this, spent with such seeming frivolity, is that we could feed the hungry with it.
I suggest nice french cheeses.
Someone
gave me a book he wrote the other day. In the introduction he was
giving a rundown of all the crazy ideological elements in some great
political battle, finishing with "the left-wing "I hate billionaires"
wackos". I read this description and turned to him and said "Hey, that's
me! I'm a left-wing "I hate billionaires" wacko!"
I have since donated the book to our friends of the library bookstore, where you can purchase it for a dollar.
And
so that is the ultimate theme of these two blog posts about buying a
soccer player for 180 million dollars: go ahead and buy stuff, even if
it's ridiculously expensive, even if it's a soccer player or a Rothko.
The real economic problem in the world now are people who have too much
money to buy anything else, what with there being nothing left they could remotely want, and so they just sit there on their pile of riches, snarling, and trying at any cost to figure out ways to get more.
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