There continues to be a lot of discussion about all the wealthy people who are around Trump in the White House, and to express that condition as if it were a bad thing.  Those criticisms are mainly coming from communist Democrats like Bernie Sanders, who have openly embraced the philosophies of Karl Marx and are inherently un-American.  I love that so many wealthy people associate with President Trump because it shows that successful people are around him.  How do you know they are successful, because they are wealthy?  Wealth is a measure of success.   It’s the scoreboard of life.  When people say you can’t take your wealth with you, why try? You are hearing a loser’s point of view, where someone wants to erase the scoreboard and use other value judgments that don’t make them look so lazy and dumb.  Wealth is a measure of success.  It’s not the only measure, but if a person has built independent wealth, the chances are that they have been very successful in life.  So when wealthy people surround Trump, it shows that he is surrounded by people who know what they are doing, and that’s a good thing.  I like and trust wealthy people because the scoreboard shows they know what they are doing, which is why a society of wealthy people is good.  Critics of this system tend to be losers trying to justify bad decisions they have made in life with some social condition that hides their incompetence.  So they hate the wealthy and disparage the wealthy as some immoral embodiment of social erosion, instead of representatives of the best that a person can be by being a winner at life.  Wealth lets people know of those victories with measures that truly matter. 

That’s not to say that all wealthy people are good, but it does give a measure to put next to the value of a person.  Someone like Nancy Pelosi, who has gained a lot of wealth off government information with insider knowledge of the markets, is not the same.  Some people cheat in life to get wealth.  But even in that condition, you learn much about the people involved based on how they play the game.  Because the scoreboard matters.  The pressure to put points on the board makes people do all kinds of things to show a winning score.  However, the pressure to play the game was what Karl Marx was trying to build a society to avoid.  Even in a biblical context, when wealth is discussed, the writers who have spent their lives writing and thinking philosophically about things tended not to have very much money, so there is always a little jealousy when they look at the scoreboard and see that they haven’t put up many points of their own.  To get through life and say it’s not whether you win or lose at life, but how you play the game, is to try to substitute the game with another value system that embraces other ways of showing success at life.  I see great morality in wealth earned because it forces people to compete and win at life, which shows that they did something of great value somewhere along the line.  And if you want to hire the best person for the job, how else do you determine their value?  If you are building a new driveway and you quote the job to two different contractors and one shows up in a barely running pickup truck looking like they just rolled out of bed, and the other shows up in a brand new dual wheeled truck with a nice paint job and advertising painted on the door, who do you think will do a better job?

While it’s true that the contractor with the beat-up truck might be a diamond in the rough, generally speaking, if people have been successful in life, they tend to show it in their social interactions.  If you go to a fancy restaurant on a Friday night and a man smelling like expensive cologne gets out of a bright red supercar, with a date that looks like she just climbed off the cover of a fashion magazine, what do you think about him?  He’s successful at something because he has acquired assets that society would consider the best of what can be gained in life from the perspective of living.  Can you take all that with you into the afterlife?  No, just like people forget the score of a football game they watched on Sunday, by Monday.  But that doesn’t mean that the players shouldn’t try hard to play and win the game.  To say the game isn’t worth playing because the score doesn’t matter is a loser position in life, and lazy.  And to be envious of the person who has a lot of wealth because they won at life a lot is petty, and a bad foundation for measuring the value of life.  Wealth is a good thing, and it’s better in life to win and to have a scoreboard that shows it than a value system that avoids the competition altogether.  Those like Bernie Sanders, and other socialists, communists, and Marxists from the Democrat party want to get rid of the scoreboards in life so that there is no measure of how much of a loser they are.  They aren’t looking to help people experiencing poverty, but to exploit them so that they don’t look so bad themselves. 

The reason Trump is getting respect around the world, especially during this Saudi Arabian visit, is that the world likes scoreboards, and America has been for them that guy getting out of the fancy car at valet parking with the hot chick on his arm smelling good for a night on the town.  And everyone else has fallen into a measurement system of a loser mentality.  They disparage wealth because they are too lazy to play the game to win themselves.  Most of us root for our favorite sports teams when they play, and when they win, we feel good.  When they lose, we get upset about it.  And the difference between those two things is the scoreboard.  We might like the players, but if they can’t win the game as measured by the scoreboard, they can’t be considered outstanding players in that sport.  The scoreboard matters, it matters in life, and in death.  The wins and losses a person has tell others they should listen to you.  How else would one generation know to listen to a previous one?  It all comes down to the scoreboard and what people do to win or lose.  Even if they cheat to win, it shows the world what they are, which is much better than saying that the scoreboard doesn’t even matter, which is the Marxist proposal.  When it comes to the Trump White House, which I just recently visited, it is good to see the displays of wealth around President Trump.  And it shows in the wins we are now getting out of the Executive Branch.  And losers like those in the Democrat Party don’t get to hide their detrimental status from the world with social criticism of a system, so they don’t look like the fools they are.  We must see it for ourselves and measure its value to the world. 

With all that said I know a lot of people who have made a lot of money by being boot lickers, con artists, and general social lowlifes who have traded their very souls to have a full wallet.  Just as in sports, our favorite teams don’t always win.  Sometimes the refs rig the game, people cheat, or luck doesn’t point in the direction of success.  Even among the very rich, most of them have not been entirely ethical along the way.  But the game itself evolves the value, and that value has great worth in its own context, one win at a time.  And it is in the pursuit of victory that life improves for everyone, and the drama of competition brings out the truth in people that would otherwise not be seen.  And behind all the merits of wealth building, there is a desire for quality, whether it’s fake or genuine, that forces a value judgement where values are very much in need of definition.  And the world is a lot better off with those judgments. 

Rich Hoffman

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