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The Secret Lives of Plutocrats

In Richistan, Robert Frank offers a breezy, well-observed peek into this gated community. You too could visit if you graduate from “butler boot camp” and become a $120,000-a-year “household manager”

By David Moberg

Ed Bazinet lives in Richistan. He moved there after pocketing more than $100 million from the sale of his company, which peddled miniature ceramic houses made in Taiwan to enthusiastic collectors whose interest Bazinet never understood. (He would disparagingly stamp their gushing letters of appreciation “get a life.”) His more famous neighbors include the Walton family, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates,… return to article

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    Perhaps the worst effect of the rich is that they inspire envy from the rest of us. It would be so refreshing to have a movement that espouses less consumption rather than more.

    Here we live in a nation of massive wealth. Even the poor have cable tv, color tv, washing machines, video game consoles, cars, etc and yet there is so much unhappiness associated with wealth or the perceived lack of same.

    Spend less, be happier. Live within your means. Old fashioned ideas that are out of time today. Pity. Pity.

    United States Posted by wolf on Aug 30, 2007 at 9:38 AM

    I used to work in landscaping. Canada is not much different in the effect of the rich getting richer on our cultural landscape. I helped to landscape hundreds of huge McMansions with people in them who were worth 10`s of millions of dollars. Many of them were high tech executives, bankers who lent to them, financial wizards, insurance poobahs..the usual suspects.

    The one thing I came away with is how very few of them were happy. The stress levels in their lives were off the scale. Once you get to that level (if its important to you and for many its what defined them) you have to try very hard to stay there. You make a lot of money but you NEED to as the bills roll in from every angle. ONe minor financial setback and you can be in big trouble with the house, the car, the boat, the plane...whatever. The kids were often painfully aware of how priviledged they were and I found many of them wanted to live less extravagantly and I know a few who renounced the monied life as soon as they could.

    90% of them weren’t monsters or bad people in any way, shape or form. But they got onto the treadmill and there is not off switch. I remember taking one of these guys fishing..totally roughing it. We walked in 8 miles to the lake. used a rowboat that leaked..He had such a good time and probably relaxed completely for the first time in years. And yet, he knew he couldn’t do it very often. I heard several years ago that he died of a heart attack at 51. Didn’t surprse me at all. He was on the treadmill and he couldn’t keep going.

    United States Posted by rocket9 on Sep 2, 2007 at 11:35 AM

    stop this absurd upper class pornography right now.

    our whole society seems to know more about the lives of the rich than you guys do.

    after the revolution, it’s going to take a healthy understanding of power to keep from going into excess mode, so let’s just cut the crap right now and start watching E! and reading Vogue and Vanity Fair, ok?

    United States Posted by daney on Sep 21, 2007 at 7:17 PM

    also, Marie Antoinette, the Sofia Coppola film (srsly)

    United States Posted by daney on Sep 21, 2007 at 7:18 PM

    if you wait until after the revolution to start enjoying yourself, you’ll fuck it up for everybody.

    you think i’m kidding.

    go do coke! NAO!!

    United States Posted by daney on Sep 21, 2007 at 7:29 PM
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