Investing The Oligarch Way

“Even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.” – Batman Begins

I tried to find a good joke about carpentry, but nothing wood work.

Most of my life I’ve lived in places that were sparsely populated.  On Wilder Mountain during the school year, the nearest kid between the ages of 5 and 16 was about 8 miles away.  Ma Wilder would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me.

I kid.  The solitude was nice.  I hiked by myself.  Some people “summered” there, meaning they had enough money to turn a season into a verb.  That was nice because that meant the same kid would show up year after year and we would go fishing or biking.

Right now, I have probably a hundred neighbors within a two-mile drive.

By many standards, that’s sparse, too.  For me, it’s just on the edge of “crowded” but since my daily commute consists of one stoplight that’s generally green, I can make it work.

You want scary?  North Korea has a missile that can hit New York City.  If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.

The trend, though, isn’t small towns like Modern Mayberry.  The trend is amazingly large and increasingly dehumanized cities.  I was watching the zombie movie set in South Korea, Last Train to Busan, with Pugsley last year.  It was really Seoul-crushing.  I decided to use the Internet to find pictures of what South Korea looks like when zombies aren’t chasing mass transit.

I was shocked by the density.  It turns out that South Korea has an average population density of 1,326 people per square mile, which is even more zombies per square mile than that German zombie movie, Shambler’s List.

Sure, you say, South Korea is only half of the population density of the city of Houston.  But that’s the urban part, and not including the ‘burbs.  The country of South Korea is, on average, nearly twice as dense as heavily populated suburbs.  On average.  That includes forests and rice paddies and zombie storage lots, er, cemeteries.

Despite the obvious inferiority for personal defense when the Moderna©-Pfizer™ Vaxombies inevitably show up (That means it’s working), cities continue to draw people to them.  The biggest reason, I suppose, is jobs.

Ever think that the evil aliens from They Live were a lot nicer than the human leaders we have today?

Having never grown up in that density, when I lived in a Houston ‘burb that had a population density of around 800 people per square mile.  I always felt lost and anonymous in that number of people.  With the flow of traffic, a five-mile jaunt to the supermarket could take 15 minutes or more.

Why did I do it?  My job.

Before writing this, I wasn’t sure how long this could go on.  A quick DuckDuckGo® search quickly told me the answer – Houston.  Certainly farther than Houston density:  one slum in Mumbai has a population density of 720,000 to 870,000 people per square mile depending on the source you choose to believe.  That’s a square (roughly) of six feet by six feet for each person, which includes streets.

36,300 people would be mashed into my five-acre lot.  I hope the ones that get assigned a space in the lake can tread water.  At heart, I’d prefer an Italian slum to an Indian one – I think I’d do okay in a spaghetto.

In other news, I now count as a family of three.

I’m pretty sure that mankind wasn’t designed in any way to live in conditions like that.  One article (which attempted to make the slum sound a lot less like a war crime) still mentioned the smell.  I guess in India none of the houses had base-mints.

Again, a slum in India isn’t a how-to manual for human habitation on Earth, but that’s a major trend in the United States today.  When I joke that they want you to live in the pod and eat the bugs, keep in mind that’s more than a joke to the powers that be.

See, I’m not kidding.

The solution, of course, is to own actual land.  Bill Gates and the other members of the Oligarch Class certainly have figured that out as well.  Bill recently bought 242,000 acres – enough to hold nearly 1.8 billion people by Mumbai-slum levels of packing ‘em in.

Although Mr. Gates is recently become exposed as über-creepy, no one accuses him of being stupid, except for the time when Melinda Gates told him, “Bill, this marriage isn’t working.”  Bill responded, “Well, let’s get divorced, remarry, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.”

The land rush is on.  Generally, these booms are followed by busts.  But when one of the things that is likely going to go bust is the currency itself, well, a small fluctuation in land prices doesn’t seem to matter much.  It must be a good deal, too.  Nearly half the land in Scotland is owned by just 432 people.  That might be why people are unhappy there – I hear even their flag is cross.

They want you to have a Land Rover® and a landlord.

Over time, the Oligarch Class has managed to create a pretty good way to hang on to wealth for generation after generation:  massive tracts of land, art, and precious things.  The Oligarch Class isn’t stupid – they keep the land and art in trusts so it moves from generation to generation seamlessly.  They never own it, but they control it.  I imagine that it would be even to imagine some of the assets tied up in trusts by the Oligarch Class.

Art?  If you have art in your family for 100 years, well, it’s bound to be worth something.  If you have it, you can sell a Picasso when revenues are down, and buy a Monet or a Manet when revenues are up.  And jewels and gold are great ways to move lots of assets in a small package.

The nice thing about being in the Oligarch Class means that no one ever gets to tell you to live in the pod and eat the bugs.  Heck, they’ve already got every need covered.  I thought about trying to set up a charity for the Oligarch class after the last land bust, but then I realized they already had one:  the United States Treasury.

Is it possible to generate this type of wealth?  Sure, some people have done it.  It’s not easy, and something tells me that behind most amazingly large fortunes are amazingly large crimes.  But after a few centuries?  Most people just forget about the crimes as you marry your kids off with other members of the Oligarch Class after they meet at Harvard™.

Getting in with the Oligarch Class is tough – entry level isn’t measured just in billions, it’s also measured in years.  Newly minted guys with just a billion or so need not apply.  They have to have standards to keep the little people out.

I’m not a hermit, at least I’ve never heard anyone call me that.

For now, at least, I live in a part of the country where I have instant and unfettered access to hundreds of acres of land to hunt on, shoot on, or just visit.  It may not be Wilder Mountain, but it’s much closer to that than Houston was for us.

Now, did I leave that Picasso in my other chalet?