Many may consider the possession of a fortune by one person while others starve a crime, but I assume Balzac was referring to the collection of wealth rather than its possession.
I may be wrong, but Bill Gates seems relatively crime-free, antitrust charges notwithstanding.
Are there others?
Sure, there must be tons. One who immediately springs to mind is J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. She just happened to be talented, hard-working, and lucky enough to create (and retain property rights to) a series of books that millions of people are willing to shell out money for. I don’t think that even her fellow-author Balzac could find a crime in that.
I think the reason that Balzac’s hyperbolic generalization still has legs, even though counterexamples are so easy to find, is that there are also lots of fortunes that do depend on illegal and unethical tactics. The moral way to get rich is through brains, industry, honesty, and luck, and many people do achieve that. However, if you’re not blessed with those qualities and you want to make a whole lot of money quickly, such tried-and-true strategies as monopolizing the industry, cheating the customers, sweating the workers, hogging the commons, and gutting the regulations are often very effective.
Balzac’s time had few mega rich entertainers like Rowling or Mega Businesses like Microsoft.
Bill Gates has tried to suffocate any competition and if he had a free hand he would be getting private info from PC’s all over the world. Reporting pirate copies and personal habits… he didn’t manage it due to Govt. control. A crime not commited maybe.
As for other more regular fortunes... Balzac might not be too far away. There might be exceptions... but then some family fortunes have been in the making for generations. At some point some crime or dirty trick might have added to that fortune.
I know of one example myself... a construction company whose disregard for the workers meant many of them lost their hearing during the building of a bridge. (underwater building) I know the daughter of this businessman. She loves to say she is worried about the less fortunate... and I am almost telling her what her Dad's company has done. That might shock her into reality... but for now she will still be a socialite spending US$ 33 thousand on one party alone.Most rich amassed their fortunes playing by the rules. Balzac was merely engaging in the classic pasttime of rationalizing failure and bashing success. THis is otherwise known as “Sour grapes”.
adaher: Most rich amassed their fortunes playing by the rules.
Um, cite? If you’re going to categorically assert as a fact that a numerical majority of rich people throughout history “amassed their fortunes playing by the rules”, I’d like to see your statistical evidence.
You should probably start by defining your terms. What counts as “rich”? Top 1% of the population of a given society in wealth? Top 10%? Do the top x% of a poor society count as “rich” even if they wouldn’t qualify as rich in other contemporary societies?
And what counts as “playing by the rules”? Does unethical behavior count against your performance, or only downright illegality? Is it “playing by the rules” to influence politicians to make the laws more favorable to you via financial contributions?
There is doubtless an interesting debate in the question of the extent to which illegal and/or unethical behavior has historically contributed to the acquisition of great wealth. But casually dismissing Balzac’s remark as “sour grapes” on the basis of one totally unsupported assertion doesn’t cut it.
Is winning the lottery a crime?
Was about to say winning the lottery… 
LeBron James is a multi-millionaire, he’s done nothing wrong as far as I know, besides not going to college (where I believe he should have polished his skills for a year).
The quote surely refers to starvation and the like, IMO.
Why can’t you dismiss one totally unsupported assertion with another unsupported assertion? Seems only fair to me.
Neurotik: Why can’t you dismiss one totally unsupported assertion with another unsupported assertion?
Because two wrongs don’t make a right, not to mention that it’s a really crappy way to fight ignorance.
I have never read the Balzac quote before, never mind in context, but when I saw the title, it immediately called to mind a quote from JP Getty:
“No one ever made a million dollars honestly.”
Does Balzac mean a literal, legal crime? Or a moral crime of some injustice that isn’t illegal?
Good question, HH. As far as I can tell, Balzac’s original wording was “Derri`ere chaque grande fortune se cache (or, il y a) un grand crime” (“behind every great fortune lies a great crime”), although I can’t find a definitive attribution or information about the context of that particular statement.
The French word “crime” seems to be generally translated by English “crime”, although it may be rendered more generally as “offense” or more specifically as “murder”. I can’t tell whether the French usage of Balzac’s day (or of today, for that matter) would have restricted the meaning of “crime” to acts that are explicitly prohibited by law. My guess would be that Balzac was referring to moral as well as legal crimes; maybe one of our French Dopers can help us out here?
**There is doubtless an interesting debate in the question of the extent to which illegal and/or unethical behavior has historically contributed to the acquisition of great wealth. But casually dismissing Balzac’s remark as “sour grapes” on the basis of one totally unsupported assertion doesn’t cut it.
**
The assertion was his. You have not asked him to prove his, why are you asking me to prove mine?
The only “proof” possible for my assertion is the fact that the vast majority of wealthy have never been convicted of a crime. All else is subject to whatever an individual considers moral or not.
If you seriously believe that the majority of wealthy have acquired their money through questionable means, then you should be prepared to prove it. You are the one making an extraordinary assertion, not I. You are also asking me to prove a negative, that the rich have not done anything wrong. It is up to you to demonstrate that they have.
Well, “throughout history” maybe not.
But the essence of capitalism is that the rich benefit directly from having a free and open marketplace where fraud and deceit are discouraged. They also benefit from having freedom among the labor-sellers, freedom to move around in the market and to sell their labor to the person best able to pay for it and make good use of it. With the onset of industrialization, slavery could no longer benefit the rich and so it naturally withered away throughout the industrializing world in the 19th century. I’d suggest that since that time, most wealthy capitalists have amassed their fortunes honestly by both moral and legal standards, though surely a few have used special favors from government to coercively gain artificial market advantages.
But prior to that time, under varioius forms of the feudalist system, wealth was maintained mostly by enslaving the peasants and using government force to acquire and maintain control of all the land. This may have been “playing by the rules” of the day, but I’d suggest it runs counter to all natural law. This became much harder to do once land stopped being the only source of wealth generation, replaced to a large extent by ideas and capital.
Strawman in aisle five. Request cleanup in aisle five.
Read what people post adaher. Your own posts are mostly worthless bits of opinion, and it doesn’t help your own case to misrepresent what others have posted.
adaher: The assertion was his [Balzac’s]. You have not asked him to prove his, why are you asking me to prove mine?
Well, I would ask Balzac for a cite too, only he’s dead. This whole thread was presumably started for the very purpose of examining Balzac’s unproven assertion and seeing whether the evidence supports it. You don’t contribute anything of value by tossing in additional unproven assertions of your own.
RD: I’d suggest that since that time [the 19th century], most wealthy capitalists have amassed their fortunes honestly by both moral and legal standards, though surely a few have used special favors from government to coercively gain artificial market advantages.
This looks like a good start to narrowing down the debate to a practicable domain, except that it unfortunately makes it irrelevant to the validity of Balzac’s claim in the 19th century.
Still, there’s no harm in trying to decide whether his claim is true for the 21st century before we get back to figuring out whether it was true for the 19th. I think, though, that the first thing we’ll need to do is agree upon some more specific definition of “wealthy” (or what Balzac called “grandes fortunes”). And we will probably also have to define what should count as a “crime”. Any ideas?
Balzac may have meant that the possession of a fortune is a crime, regardless of how it came to be.
In a Roussean vein, Balzac may have meant that the institution of private property itself is a crime. Who was it that said ‘Property of theft’–Balzac or some other French fellow? At any rate, Balzac’s thinking the institution of private property is a crime, he’d be squarely in the 19th century francophone tradition.
But if we’re talking about actual moral or legal crimes, I’d think I’d want to start with the null hypothesis that humans of all ages, sexes, races, and classes have a tendency to cheat, cut corners, chisel, shirk, push for maximum advantage and minimum obligation. The rich probably play for bigger stakes than working blokes, of course…
Property is theft was Proudhon.
I don’t think its fair to trash Balzac given that, in the time he was writing, his statement could be considered quite true. Today is radically different from that period, so perhaps his assertion no longer holds so much water. But then again, statements which are true for today will almost certainly not be true for two hundred years from now.
Just remember the story of the ruler who demanded to know one timeless truth and received the answer: This too shall pass.
Thanks, Neurotik.
I have to assume that since the Balzac quote claims that behind every fortune lies a crime, he doesn’t mean something about actual criminal (legal or moral) acts. I mean, surely he can’t rule out that there’s at least one fortune acquired without criminal acts. That’d be a tall claim.
I’d have to assume he means something like ‘Property is theft’ or that it’s immoral to possess a fortune while others barely subsist.