The Washington Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, is exiting as the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, steers the section in a libertarian direction.
In an email to The Post’s employees on Wednesday, Mr. Bezos said that Mr. Shipley was stepping down amid a narrowing of the opinion section’s focus to defend “personal liberties and free markets.”
“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical; it drives creativity, invention and prosperity.”
In his note, Mr. Bezos said that he asked Mr. Shipley whether he wanted to stay at The Post, and Mr. Shipley declined.
I don’t know. Billions of dollars can buy a lot of fucking freedom and liberty. But only for him.
Not really. You can free yourself from many societal restrictions, but you can never be free from who you are and what you’ve done with your life. Nor can you be free from the social climate in which you exist.
Money can buy a lot of freedom, but it’s like an asymptote. The closer you get to complete freedom, the more you realize that it’s impossible to obtain, especially in modern society.
Can it? On paper they should be enough for people to get out of the hamster wheel a millions time over, but the oligarchs all managed to trap themselves in their own guilded cages with shiny gold plated hamster wheels. The dysfunction that allows people to become billionaires and still sleep at night also prevents them from ever being free.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had even a reasonable fraction of a billion dollars, I would fuck off to the Bahamas with my wife, a yacht, and an entourage of young ladies and men of questionable moral character, and you would never hear from me again.
You are right that they are broken people.