The View | Beijing’s crackdown on wealthy excess puts the US to shame
Trump and Clinton’s past behaviour exemplifies America’s acceptance of greedy decadence and puts capitalism in a bad light
Less than a decade after cartoonishly rich US bankers blew up the global economy, Americans are considering electing as president a man who lives in gold-plated palaces and plies the oceans in supersized yachts.
China, meanwhile, is publicly shaming former high flyers for conspicuous consumption as trivial as feasting on crocodile tails and swilling shots of Moutai liquor.
For sure, the Chinese high flyers whose decadent behaviour is featured in the documentary series Always on the Road are in jail for corruption, whereas Donald J Trump, or even his far-from-penniless rival Hillary Clinton, have never been convicted of breaking laws in accruing their wealth.
The cultural contrast is striking, however. While China’s state is excoriating conspicuous displays of wealth, in America supporters of Trump point to his lavish wealth as proof of his innate skill and power.
Admiring the rich is not a new thing in the United States, nor necessarily a bad thing. The country has long been able to attract talented individuals to its shores, in part because economic success is generally applauded rather than resented.
However, in recent decades the upper classes in the US have gone on a shameless binge. The ratio of a CEO’s pay to the average worker’s has catapulted to 300 times from just 25 times in the 1960s, for instance, and evidence from researchers such as Harvard’s Lucian Bebchuk shows that the connection between CEO super-pay and performance is weak.
