Are capitalists cheats? I pose this question because of a recent article in the New York Times by the novelist Sam Lipsyte. In the piece he writes that a new version of the board game Monopoly has a tower with an infrared sensor to stop cheating. The author says: “Our capitalist system has always harboured cheats, catapulted them through loopholes into riches and glory” and “.?.?.?the Big Cheat, the entire matrix of money and land and development and investment that’s already locked down?.?.?.” His remarks remind me of those by an earlier writer, Honoré de Balzac: “Behind every great fortune is a crime.” Sadly, I think in the wake of the banking and property collapse, the view that the whole economy is rigged in favour of crooks is worryingly common.
資本家是騙子嗎？我之所以提出這個(gè)問(wèn)題是因?yàn)樾≌f(shuō)家薩姆?里普西特(Sam Lipsyte)在《紐約時(shí)報(bào)》(New York Times)上的一篇文章。他在文章中寫道，新版桌游大富翁(Monopoly)設(shè)置了一座配備紅外傳感器的電子塔，旨在阻止使詐。他表示：“我們的資本主義體系一直包庇騙子，讓他們通過(guò)漏洞走捷徑得到財(cái)富和榮耀”，還有“……大欺騙(Big Cheat)——由金錢、土地、開發(fā)和投資構(gòu)成的已經(jīng)鎖定的整個(gè)體系……”。他的這些言論讓我想起更早一位作家巴爾扎克(Honoré de Balzac)的話：“在巨大財(cái)富的背后，都隱藏著罪惡。”遺憾的是，在銀行業(yè)和房地產(chǎn)崩盤之后，我認(rèn)為，認(rèn)為整個(gè)經(jīng)濟(jì)都有利于騙子的看法普遍得令人擔(dān)憂。