Most people agree that wealth inequality is a serious problem. The large and growing wealth gap isn’t just unfair, it is a danger to the stability of our regime.
Politicians like Elizabeth Warren and especially Bernie Sanders are popular, above all, because they are seen as advocates for the people against the rapacious rich.
The problem is that politicians seem to think there is only one way to redistribute wealth: raise taxes. It is a little fishy that the one idea they have is the one that specifically enriches and empowers them.
If we were serious about taking from the rich, we’d come up with a more imaginative gameplan.
How about encouraging corporations to give their employees shares of stock in every paycheck? This would ensure that Wall Street rallies would benefit workers and not just the wealthy.
That’s just one idea to get some money out of the hands of super rich people. Rudy Kurniawan came up with a way better one.
With the rise of the dot.com millionaire came the rise of the high-priced wine auction. At these auctions, super rich nitwits blew thousands of dollars on individual bottles of over-hyped old French vino.
Out of nowhere, a young Indonesian immigrant named Rudy Kurniawan burst onto the scene. No one knew where he was getting his money or what his angle was, but Rudy began cornering the market on elite fine wine and driving up the price.
You would have thought that American wine snobs would hate Rudy. But the directors of “Sour Grapes” can’t find anyone who has a bad word to say about him.
Rudy was as generous and gregarious as he was mysterious. He threw parties and shared his best wine with friends. Rudy impressed wine snobs with his exquisite taste and unique ability to recognize different vintages.
But Rudy made one powerful enemy: billionaire wine collector jerk Bill Koch. While his brothers like politics, Bill likes to go out of his way to ruin people’s fun.
Killjoy Bill wants to make sure that all of his vast, overpriced wine collection is legit, so he has a professional investigator on staff. The investigator and his ex-CIA colleagues discovered some inconsistencies with Rudy Kurniawan’s wine labels.
Apparently, the FBI has nothing better to do than investigate wine fraud, so they got in on the case, too. It all ended in 2012, when the feds busted down Rudy’s door and uncovered the counterfeit wine-making operation in his kitchen.
Rudy had been bilking the superrich for years: selling $20 bottles of wine for $thousands.
The question is, though, did Rudy do anything wrong? No one complained about the wine. Rudy was such an extraordinary connoisseur that he always fooled buyers by filling the bottles with cheap wine that had the same taste as the original. “Sour Grapes” interviews outraged Burgundy vineyard owner Laurent Ponsot. Monsieur Ponsot came all the way to America to make sure that Rudy was punished for defaming his family’s wines. I find Ponsot’s position obnoxious and absurd. If Rudy was able to fool elite wine buyers with his California counterfeits, it seems clear that Ponsot’s fancy snooty French wines aren’t that special.
Let me recap the score of the wealth distribution game: Senators Sanders and Warren are folk heroes for threatening to soak the rich. Meanwhile, Rudy Kurniawan is serving hard time in federal prison for selling overpriced bottles of tasty wine to rich people.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that the government is working to protect the interests of the 1% rather than redistribute wealth.