There is a scene in Roman Polanski’s classic Chinatown (1974) in which P. I. Jake Gittes confronts the loathsome, unfathomably wealthy Noah Cross about Cross’s crooked land grab. “Why are you doing it?” Jake asks. “How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”
“The future,” Cross replies, and shortly thereafter, rationalizing a yet more evil crime, he says, “You see, Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place, they’re capable of anything.”
To control the future, be it one’s own or an entire country’s, and to possess seemingly unlimited power to realize one’s whims—these are seductive goals for a certain type of person, and one needn’t disavow free-market capitalism to ask whether this is a type of person to be admired or emulated. Most of us are like Jake: We can think of a number, hit it, and be satisfied with the good things it provides. The husband and wife in Jonathan Dee’s icily frightening The Privileges, Adam and Cynthia Morey, would regard us with all the respect due to insect larvae.[1]
Adam, who is making money hand over fist in private equity, embodies the objection the very rich have to those who object to the very rich: It isn’t about the money, it’s about what you can do with it. The unwashed and undereducated masses, maxing out their credit cards at Best Buy, look at
