Isn't Epstein really "The Billionaire Problem"

DaisyAnneReturns

I can't get away from the similarity to bipolar "highs" (mania/hypomania). Empathy can decrease to none. In the case of bipolar it's due to extreme self-absorption, high-speed thoughts, and increased impulsivity, which prioritise internal sensations over others' feelings.

The brain's focus shifts to intense euphoria or irritability, reducing the capacity for emotional processing and recognition of external cues. The lack of empathy can easily feel like deliberate cruelty, and the opinion of "self" is so very Trumpian - the biggest, the best, etc. It often causes increased, intense sexual desire known as hypersexuality, affecting up to 57% of patients and leading to impulsive, risky behavior. Other people an become pawns in their attempt to wield their assumed superiority.

If it gets out of hand people can be sectioned for their own sake and others ...
so why is Trump still free?

Trump isn't mentally ill- this does a disservice for those who do have bi-polar or similar ilnesses.

He may have a personality disorder but that isn't the same thing.

He is a convicted felon, and should be serving time (or a massive fine) rather than being sectioned- I'm not sure this is an option in the US anyway.

He is free because the US is a corrupt state where the super-rich hold sway- nothing to do with mental illness.

MaizieD

You haven't read the Taxing Wealth Report, either, David.

I have read Murphys tax report and my conclusion is that for idealogical reasons it could be done but wouldnt raise much extra tax and discourage enterprise.

You haven't read the Taxing Wealth Report, either, David.

Taxing wealth.

Yes, you could tax wealth on the way up as long as you accept that it reduces the ability of a business to expand, to be profitable. A business would need to borrow more and increase its costs to resulting in lower profits and reduced taxation. The same could be achieved by increasing existing taxation rates or restricting allowances.

Business operates on a global platform unless a universal wealth tax was agree it would disadvantage countries that adopted it.

MaizieD I rrespond to you regulalry, so I am sure I have responded to you at least once, but I do not want to bore people by constantly saying the same thing.

Sorry, you have never responded to the ideas set out in the Taxing Wealth document, You're not even doing it now.

I don't think you even understand what it is I am saying about taxing them to prevent the acquisition of excessive wealth. This is completely different from taxing it when they've already acquired it.

I wrote ....attempts to tax it (their wealth) back off them would encounter the many almost insuperable barriers they erect between their wealth and the taxman. Did you not read that bit before lecturing me on how wealth is so difficult to tax?

I'm sorry, MOnica because 90% of the time I respect much of what you write, but when it comes to economics you just don't seem to comprehend what I am saying. Perhaps the fault is mine in not making myself clear enough?

I believe many of the people (especially men) who gain extreme wealth or power are already flawed humans. In order to get where they are, they need to be totally self absorbed and ruthless, often destroying others and using underhand means to reach the top. So in essence they are already "monsters" but it doesn't become entirely evident until they have the money and sway to do exactly as they please.

People need to face reality. Men like sex.....men want unattached sex......older men want sex with young girls. Those with money are prepared to pay for what they want and people like Epstein are willing to give them what they want. There is nothing new in all of this and I suspect, that if a member of the royal family were not involved, this case wouldn't be getting so much attention.

petra

It has long been known that up to 10% of bankers / financial services workers are psychopaths.

www.aru.ac.uk/news/psychopaths-prepared-to-spark-financial-crisis-for-profit#:~:text=Since%20I%20began%20researching%20corporate,people's%20money%2C%20has%20gained%20traction.

Yes, that's been my experience and why I keep well away from those sharks, having said that if you are going to be successful in business you are going to make hard decisions. Increasingly those decisions are made by women, it's not just men and your success depends on you making them

I can't get away from the similarity to bipolar "highs" (mania/hypomania). Empathy can decrease to none. In the case of bipolar it's due to extreme self-absorption, high-speed thoughts, and increased impulsivity, which prioritise internal sensations over others' feelings.

The brain's focus shifts to intense euphoria or irritability, reducing the capacity for emotional processing and recognition of external cues. The lack of empathy can easily feel like deliberate cruelty, and the opinion of "self" is so very Trumpian - the biggest, the best, etc. It often causes increased, intense sexual desire known as hypersexuality, affecting up to 57% of patients and leading to impulsive, risky behavior. Other people an become pawns in their attempt to wield their assumed superiority.

If it gets out of hand people can be sectioned for their own sake and others ...
so why is Trump still free?

keepingquiet

I am so relieved to have very little money and less and less power...I have all the freedom I need thankyou.

I don't think it is so much the money that makes people psychotic but their ability to lie. This begins with what used to be called 'creative accounting'. I guess this is how Epstein wielded his power.

Lying is the most virulent epidemic on the planet. Once the process begins, it is practically impossible to stop.

Mountbatten Windsor has caught himself in this trap.
All he needs to do is stand up and tell the truth- but it seems he will avoid this option as long as he can, which may be forever.

We saw this play out yesterday with Maxwell's testimony- there is no advantage for these people in telling the truth.

One wonders whether these people lie to themselves in the first place - as so many of them seem to see the rest of us like we're a different species to them (well we know Epstein does basically).

He certainly sees himself as "special" and it's no wonder he married Fergie in the first place ("takes one to know one" and he recognised her as like mind).

I'm sorry not to have been able to have typed up more of the original video but I ran out of time. I will do some more if I get a moment.

M0nica

MaizieD I rrespond to you regulalry, so I am sure I have responded to you at least once, but I do not want to bore people by constantly saying the same thing.

You cannot tax people in isolation. Tax very rich people here and they will just move somewhere else. You only have to read the papers to see how these people have homes all over the world and constantly travel - and can change tax location at the drop of a hat.

You also need to take into account the kind of person who has the personality that makes money. There is so much more to it than just having a good idea and going with it. Most of the men, and it is motly men, so far, are the kind who just steamroller, walk over and flatten everything before them.

I worked in the energy industry, and met them. The head of my employer, a man who gave his life to engineering and public service took on Mrs Thatcher and won.

While the elcetricity industry was broken up into regional companies and generation of electricity was separated from distribution. The gas industry was nationalised as one national company that did everything from drill bit to burner tip. It was split later, after he retired, but a man like that today would be in the private sector and all the tax rules in the world would not touch him. He would just move to the USA, Middle East, Monaco, Switzerland.

Tax rules are fine if you can make them stick. They may work in countries that do not produce many very rich people anyway, but they also drive them away. They do not invest in countries with very high or punitive tax systems.

Although there’s some truth to the notion that taxes can influence mobility, M0nica the evidence doesn’t support a blanket statement that taxing the wealthy inevitably leads to them all leaving the effect is real in some cases but not universal or overwhelmingly large.

MaizieD I rrespond to you regulalry, so I am sure I have responded to you at least once, but I do not want to bore people by constantly saying the same thing.

You cannot tax people in isolation. Tax very rich people here and they will just move somewhere else. You only have to read the papers to see how these people have homes all over the world and constantly travel - and can change tax location at the drop of a hat.

You also need to take into account the kind of person who has the personality that makes money. There is so much more to it than just having a good idea and going with it. Most of the men, and it is motly men, so far, are the kind who just steamroller, walk over and flatten everything before them.

I worked in the energy industry, and met them. The head of my employer, a man who gave his life to engineering and public service took on Mrs Thatcher and won.

While the elcetricity industry was broken up into regional companies and generation of electricity was separated from distribution. The gas industry was nationalised as one national company that did everything from drill bit to burner tip. It was split later, after he retired, but a man like that today would be in the private sector and all the tax rules in the world would not touch him. He would just move to the USA, Middle East, Monaco, Switzerland.

Tax rules are fine if you can make them stick. They may work in countries that do not produce many very rich people anyway, but they also drive them away. They do not invest in countries with very high or punitive tax systems.

M0nica

MaizieD

It is also more than likely that the excessively wealthy suffer from the psychiatric condition known as pleonoxia

Pleonexia is a psychiatric disorder of excessive greed or desire for wealth or objects.

It could perhaps be seen as a kindness to potential sufferers to try to prevent them from becoming excessively wealthy in the first place?

And a kindness to humanity in general to prevent the bad effects their greed has on the decidedly less wealthy…

How do you do that. The excessively wealthy have to have the wealth in the first place, in order for it to be taxed. Surely we should encourage to get even richer so that they pay even more in tax

Oh, don’t be ridiculous, MOnica. The wealthy pay a miniscule amount of tax compared with ordinary mortals on PAYE. Making them even more wealthy would just make everyone else even poorer as they acquire more and more of the money the state issues. And attempts to tax it back off them would encounter the many almost insuperable barriers they erect between their wealth and the taxman.

I have posted a link many times to the Taxing Wealth Report, which is full of suggestions for reducing their ability to acquire so much wealth in the first place. I have asked for your opinion of it and you have never responded. I think it’s more than annoying that you should, yet again, ask how it could be done when I’ve so frequently pointed to the practical suggestions of someone with far more expertise on taxation than I have with absolutely no response from you.

I am so relieved to have very little money and less and less power...I have all the freedom I need thankyou.

I don't think it is so much the money that makes people psychotic but their ability to lie. This begins with what used to be called 'creative accounting'. I guess this is how Epstein wielded his power.

Lying is the most virulent epidemic on the planet. Once the process begins, it is practically impossible to stop.

Mountbatten Windsor has caught himself in this trap.
All he needs to do is stand up and tell the truth- but it seems he will avoid this option as long as he can, which may be forever.

We saw this play out yesterday with Maxwell's testimony- there is no advantage for these people in telling the truth.

MaizieD

It is also more than likely that the excessively wealthy suffer from the psychiatric condition known as pleonoxia

Pleonexia is a psychiatric disorder of excessive greed or desire for wealth or objects.

It could perhaps be seen as a kindness to potential sufferers to try to prevent them from becoming excessively wealthy in the first place?

And a kindness to humanity in general to prevent the bad effects their greed has on the decidedly less wealthy…

How do you do that. The excessively wealthy have to have the wealth in the first place, in order for it to be taxed. Surely we should encourage to get even richer so that they pay even more in tax

Part One: Power Rewires the Brain
To start let's get into the neuroscience because that's were it all begins. There was a study at McMaster University by someone called Sukhvinder Obhi, who ran experiments measuring how power impacts neural processes. He had participants refle t on times when they had power over someone else. He then measured their brain activity an FMRI. What he found was chilling - that power inhibits the brains mirroring function. You might or might no know this but mirroring neurons, they are the kind of neurological impulse that let's us empathise. When we see somebody in pain our brain literally mirrors that experience for us do we emotionally understand it. It's involuntary and fundamental to bring human. Having power shuts that down. That's not theory, this is the rhetoric, it's fact. The fact. Repeatable, peer-reviewed studies show that effect again and again. Being super-rich rewires the brain to make ou treat other humans as accessories to use. Society madly calls it succes;, neurology calls it damage; therapy calls it "we really need to talk - a lot. Sit down."

It is also more than likely that the excessively wealthy suffer from the psychiatric condition known as pleonoxia

Pleonexia is a psychiatric disorder of excessive greed or desire for wealth or objects.

It could perhaps be seen as a kindness to potential sufferers to try to prevent them from becoming excessively wealthy in the first place?

And a kindness to humanity in general to prevent the bad effects their greed has on the decidedly less wealthy…

petra

It has long been known that up to 10% of bankers / financial services workers are psychopaths.

www.aru.ac.uk/news/psychopaths-prepared-to-spark-financial-crisis-for-profit#:~:text=Since%20I%20began%20researching%20corporate,people's%20money%2C%20has%20gained%20traction.

You do not become a multi millionaire/billionaire by playing Mr Nice Guy. You do it by being prepared to render your own grandmother down for lard, walking over people's faces and being prepared to grind the faces of the poor into the mud.

Once you are very, very, filthy rich, you try to cover your tracks, by investing in good deeds, donating vast sums of money to charity, better still forming a charitable trust that bears yourr name and goes round donating money to causes that help the people you ruined on your way up - the elderly, children, disadvantaged groups of all kinds and to get the respect of your fellow very,very, filthy rich people you support famous museums, art galleries and opera houses.

I will say this for Peter Mandelson, I have never seen any evidence that suggests he supports any charitable ventures, what he makes he keeps for himself. In that sense he is honest!!!

Yes is it not surgeons that have a higher than average incidence of psychopathy in their profession compared to others

Galaxy

But people in poverty are more likely to be involved in violent crime, so am not sure what that shows, perhaps extremes of income either way.

Not all psychopaths are violent or dangerous.

www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/not-all-psychopaths-are-criminal

But people in poverty are more likely to be involved in violent crime, so am not sure what that shows, perhaps extremes of income either way.

Yep...I was watching that video earlier today and thinking that he put it all quite clearly.

Let's face it - you've got to be "not quite" at least in some ways for mental functioning if you can sit there using all that level of cash just on yourself for all your whims and desires - when there are people out there genuinely putting in a reasonable effort and havent even got enough to exist on reasonably.

I tend to like reasonable level Economics takes on things - as they usually make so much sense to me and Economics was one of the subjects I "had time for" back in schooldays. It explains a lot....

AGAA4

Bumping this as worth discussing.

Judging by the amount of billionaires who are monsters I do wonder what happens when people become extremely rich.

Indeed, I've sometimes wondered about Elon Musk who has acquired a bit of a track record for making thinly-veiled references to paedophilia in relation to people he falls out with or simply doesn't like.

Remember when the British diver/potholer, who rescued several children after they got stuck in an underground cave and was openly labelled 'the paedo guy' by Musk, took him to court and unfortunately lost his case? Musk could afford an entire regiment of lawyers - nobody stands a chance against those odds.

And Musk has done exactly the same thing since.

However, it's said that the traits and negative behaviours we think we see in others are the very qualities we harbour within ourselves and make efforts to hide.

For all his money I think Musk is struggling to bury some sinister secrets.

It has long been known that up to 10% of bankers / financial services workers are psychopaths.

www.aru.ac.uk/news/psychopaths-prepared-to-spark-financial-crisis-for-profit#:~:text=Since%20I%20began%20researching%20corporate,people's%20money%2C%20has%20gained%20traction.