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？我之所以提出這個問題是因爲小說家薩姆•裏普西特(Sam Lipsyte)在《紐約時報》(New York Times)上的一篇文章。他在文章中寫道，新版桌遊地產大亨(Monopoly)設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，讓他們通過漏洞走捷徑得到財富和榮耀」，還有「……大欺騙(Big Cheat)——由金錢、土地、開發和投資構成的已經鎖定的整個體系……」。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：「在巨大財富的背後，都隱藏著罪惡。」遺憾的是，在銀行業和房地產崩盤之後，我認爲，認爲整個經濟都有利於騙子的看法普遍得令人擔憂。