Horse 3185 - See The Car That The Owner Can't Drive

 I have been asked to write a piece about what I think about the Melbournian property developer who paid millions of dollars for a hypercar and then have it hauled into his apartment by crane to the 50-somethingth floor. 

I suppose that given that I am a known car person, that I would be sad about something like this being hauled into the sky, only to be never used for the purpose for which it was intended. However, I am fine with it.

I suppose that given that I have written many pieces about things like economics and philosophy, that I should be outraged about someone spending this amount of money. However, I am fine with it.

The truth is that this particular hypercar with however many turbos it has and however many buff horses and torques that it might have been able to produce, has been resigned to a life of being nothing more than an expensive art piece. Given that I can't even be bothered to find out what kind of car it is, much less anything about what specifications it might have had, and that I think that in the sky it is as useful/useless as any other art piece, then up to this point I think I've successfully demonstrated as much applied apathy towards it as I would any other private art piece. If the guy likes to look at it, if the guy gets some kind of satisfaction that he could spend so many dollars, then it has fulfilled its new function. However, I am fine with it.

Would I have spent many millions of dollars on a car that I can not drive? No. To that end, someone like Betty Klimenko of Westfield fame and who owns Erebus Motorsport, has in my mind derived far more enjoyment and given far more enjoyment to the world than this chap has. Her team has claimed arguably the greatest prize in Australian motorsport; for far less money than this property developer spent. 

Would I have put the money to other use? Almost certainly. Personally I could do with not paying to live in someone else's house but beyond that I don't really know what I would definitively do. There are a multitude of charitable causes in the world, and business opportunities to be able to generate new funds for said charitable causes but in my current circumstances, I neither have the knowledge nor this amount of capital to be able to make them work. 

The question of what I think about this Melbourninan property developer who paid millions of dollars for a hypercar, sort of misses the deeper moral question. Namely why has the kosmos allowed him to exist in the first place? Not why has the kosmos allowed this chap to exist but why the kosmos has allowed any for profit property developer to exist in the first place? We have a homelessness problem where particularly older women are becoming the new unseen demographic in trouble. We have rents increasing at faster rates than people's wages are increasing and never once does anyone bother to ask about the moral fitness of that as a thing. Whatever moral objections that the kosmos should have had that allows someone to make insane profits from the tables of other people, is immediately nullified by the fact that someone has made insane profits. Money, markets, and the kosmos care not an iota about moral questions, nor the goodness and/or fitness and/or proprietary of why the reward system exists as it does.

Clearly this person was not all that charity minded but we could have already guessed that in the first place because that it how he made his money. On one hand people complain about the notion of having to pay any kind of taxation but seem to have no problem with the fact that if you do not have a house, then you are in effect paying a higher marginal taxation rate just for the privilege of living in one. We have taxation incentives for people who make money via charging someone else to live in a property, but no such equivalent for the people who actually get charged for that same process.

The fact that I am ambivalent about the fact that this Melbourninan property developer paid millions of dollars for a hypercar and then have it hauled into his apartment in the sky, is secondary to the problem that this Melbourninan property developer exists. I could care less about this car but I fail to see how. What is worrying, is why in the space of less than a kilometer, one person is rewarded merely for owning houses and gets to live in a mansion in the sky, while others get punished for not owning a house and get to live on the embankment by the Yarra.

Aside:

If I did happen to have many hundreds of millions of dollarpounds, I would consider starting my own car company. Not even for the reason that I want to make profits either, though it would need to in order to be an enduring enterprise. No, the reason why I want my own car company is because I happen to like the idea that we should be able to make stuff here. Making stuff employs people. Making stuff means that we don't have to import said stuff from that mythical place called "overseas". Making stuff means that we'd not only need to employ people but we'd need to buy components from other companies to make stuff; which employs other people at those companies. 

And I'd get my own race car team to play with on the world stage too. That would have the knock-on effect of letting the rest of the world that we make stuff and hopefully they'd buy our stuff too.

In principle, merely dumping capital into property (which is what we've redesigned the economy to do over the past 20 years), is really really stupid. I already think that the entire financial system is a moral vacuum and borderline evil and property development for the express purpose of extracting profits from people is really not much different.