My "lavish lifestyle", "real estate":
We live in a 45m2 studio apt my wife owns in Jurmala. I've never owned a house I lived in.
My only vehicle has two leg-powered wheels.
You own stuff, stuff owns you; which makes me a walking, talking great depression. Want to make every shopping mall shrivel? Clone me.
If you think that everyone who doesn't take St Francis-like vows of poverty is living hypocritically and lavishly, that says more about your moral purity obsession than me.
The real purpose of money: so you can tell bigshots where to go (Humphrey Bogart) or, my version: to buy your way out of contact with idiots. I've saved enough to do this, but not enough to be called rich. https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/the-real-purpose-of-money-6f4ecbc5e2fe
My partners and I have nurtured one startup from 6 to 1000+ people. Did we do well? Yes. Did the many early stage employees with stock options? Beyond their wildest dreams. If this is exploitation, you have a strange definition for it. I've verified empirically that most startups fail. So far, half of mine have. Without risk-tolerant investors like us, entrepreneurs' dream business ideas die.
"Skin in the game": you have skin in your clients' games, which gives you some.
MAGA-style reality denial has a lefty version, which sees western maritime empires' conquests as giving the land-based colonial empires they defeated a free pass and sees its last two men left standing--China and Russia--as somehow aligned with anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism. This puts them squarely in morally blind Russified Whataboutistan.
Undeniable realities of the last five centuries of human history:
1. The Dutch invented the modern world, the rule of law, rules above the rulers bond market and fiscal-military state that Alexander Hamilton called Dutch finance. The English copied it and the Americans copied the copy. Everyone else adapts by copying or stays poor. https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-modern-world-a-dutch-invention-the-english-copy-fda9ced7a6b8 The short version is in the youtube videos of Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.
2. History's tragic menu is bad vs worse and indifferent to your aspirations to moral purity.
Examples of how previous crimes pass the statute of limitations when bad vs worse kicks in:
a. Britain's Amritsar mass shooting of Indian protestors in 1919 during the 1940 Battle of Britain.
b. Stalin's genocidal planned Holodomor famine in Ukraine during the siege of Leningrad and Operation Bagration that allowed the western Allies to breakout from Normandy beaches and hedgerows.
c. American slavery, race terror and the codified racism of Jim Crow the Nazis copied while the Tuskegee airmen were shooting down German fighters to protect B-17s and Anglo-Americans were dying on Normandy beaches to create your future.
d. French imperial crimes in Algeria and Indochina while they were occupied by Nazis and the Japanese.
e. The 1943 Bengal famine created by criminal British negligence during the battle of Imphal against Japan. Ask Mahatma Gandhi.
Neither the western maritime empires that won the 20th century's world wars and their defeated land-based rivals (Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Germans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese (who were both) discovered the virtues of peace without being defeated by independence wars of liberation. Post-1945 Western Europe became virtuously peaceful because the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, Portuguese and Spanish were all defeated in colonial wars. Nothing less than Dienbienphu-style or helicopter liftoff from the Saigon embassy rooftop is a good teacher of peace. Now it's Russia's turn to learn this decolonization lesson in Ukraine through total defeat. The post-1918 lesson about how half-defeated empires turn to revanchist fascism tells you nothing less will suffice. The Rules of Russian History I've studied since 1972 tell you Russian civil war and state collapse is back on the menu.
