The real estate guy played every card in the deck, I'm almost impressed.
- He can't justify things in moral or even close utilitarian terms, so avoiding taxes is just something "intelligent people" do . The rich are rich just because they are intelligent.
- We shouldn't decry capitalism, because seeking wealth is just a natural law of civilizations. This meaning that it's simply unavoidable and we shouldn't bother to try to stop it.
- He even jumps into the old "It's the middle class that suffers the most" trope that they always use, because they're the ones that have to pay all the taxes while the rich and poor live off the work of the mistreated middle class. This makes the poor out to be parasites, that are at least as much, if not more to blame for inequality. Anyone that feels they are paying too much in taxes will then know that they must be this middle class, and that the poor are the reason why they have to pay so much in taxes and live paycheck to paycheck (not realising they are the poor by their country's standards, and that the only ones below them make so little they literally can't be taxed.)
It's scary how the bourg factory just mass produces these people, and even when they are highly financially successful like this guy, they still have to sell the youtube "How to become a billionaire" channel spiel. At some point I have to wonder if they start believing their own bullshit. Maybe that's the only way they can live with themselves?
I think what gets to me with these kinds of things is not so much the scale of the issue, but the denial of it as a problem or the acceptance of it as something unavoidable. Even for people that have cared at some point, the difficulty in finding a solution on a personal or even societal level, leads them to have to conclude that it's not so big a problem after all. Like googling articles that confirm that drinking wine or eating chocolate is actually healthy, because your inability to give up the habit makes you feel bad.
A constant active awareness of the immense suffering and inequality around the world isn't healthy, but the opposite of convincing yourself that it's not a problem at all makes any sliver of a solution less likely. The purest ideology allows us to believe that since problems can only truly be solved in one way (market forces, liberal democracy) that suffering or death occurring under the mandate of such forces are 'natural' and unpreventable. In fact, to take direct action to solve things like poverty outside of these forces, is to challenge the natural order. And like some kind of trolley problem morality, direct interference now makes you responsible for the situation, whereas the deliberate neglect before was more wholesome and good, as you adhered to the natural laws. This is why China's Xinjiang policies are unforgivable, being direct actions, while hundreds of millions of starving Indians under deliberate neglect is not, even though the suffering and death born from the later is incalculably greater- even assuming the worst possible accusations against China are true.
I think the full acceptance of the situation of the world, and the realisation that you are personally unable to fix it no matter how hard you dry, either leads people down a path of denial or self sacrifice (think eco-terrorism or devoting yourself to work in a hospital in the exploited world.) My personal cope is to follow an ideal of living a life such that if everyone in my position did the same, it would see the improvements to the world that I hope for come to be. This is towing the line between action and inaction, of denial and self sacrifice, but it's the only way I can think to live a relatively 'normal' life while recognising the vast suffering adjacent to it. Though I am not sure if it's the right thing to do.