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by houseabsolute 5748 days ago
It seems like there is an entire industry that's been built up in this country selling rich oil barons things they don't need, paid for with money that doesn't really belong to them.
2 comments

A) It's not "something they don't need"; they can easily write it off as a business expense doing PR for their country and attracting more outside investors keen to discover this 'green' oasis in Arabia (please ignore the Dubai behind the curtain, move along, nothing to see here ..)

B) The money belongs to them. They don't even advertise their crack; people go out of their way to seek it, pay for it dearly, and sometimes even mount belligerent invasions to get it :-) Only thing worse than a dealer is an armed crackhead.

I would say it belongs more to the people and less to the sheiks; that was the point I was trying to make.
Who does the money belong to?
This is not a trivial question when you touch on mining-related issues. One can only become that rich by an artificial scarcity that is created when one person/company "owns" a part of land it bought way below value (since the true value should include all the billions of mined material). Also, anyone could mine the land, so it's not like farming, where skill really matters.

I don't think there can be a trivial answer to this question of who has the money that, in practice, is just lying there for the taking