| Every one of us has run into situations where choosing to be honest has materially cost us. You accidentally scratch a parked car on your way out. Do you stop and leave a note with contact info or not? The richer you are, the more leverage you have and larger the material cost for these situations. A fellow rich friend gives you a little insider info that a stock you hold is about to crater. Do you sell some? In other words, being honest is a tax, and the wealthier you are, the higher that tax rate. Given that, I think the only way to reach certain levels of wealth is by not paying that tax. Therefore, I treat anyone at Musk's level of wealth as intrinsically untrustworthy. You don't get to be a billionaire by being a normal honest human. And if by miracle you should happen to, being a billionaire I think fundamentally changes your psychology such that you cease to be normal and honest. There may be exceptions, but I think they are exceedingly rare. Billionaires are functionally a different species. |
Being honest is an investment in an honest society and a just future. Of course, the problem with being honest is that, as with any ideological conflict, those who volunteer for the front lines make the most sacrifices, and have to trust that the tide will someday turn in favor of their side, even though they may never see it happen. So there's a lot of "you go first" noise instead of active effort to walk the talk.
Nonetheless this trending fad of referring to any cost that has no obvious immediate benefit to the payer a tax is starting to outgrow the original, and usefully narrow, scope it once had.
It would be equally valid, semantically, (and I would argue more valid prescriptively) to observe that having to constantly verify at great expense what in an honest society you could you could otherwise trusted at nearly zero expense, is the more costly and pernicious "tax" on total human productivity.