Profiteers & Punishment

It never fails to amaze me the depths to which fellow humans could descend to, for the sake of riches that can never be taken with us when we go. Often, it leaves a trail of catastrophic destruction and thousands, even millions of innocent persons could be affected.


I am not a saint and if I want to have money, I prefer to earn it the honest way, through my own personal brilliance or diligence. According to the sayings, all of us will get our chance. The only problem is, when the time comes, will we take it or prefer to forgo the risks. Being in my line of work, I do get to see more opportunities than the average man. Sometimes, giving a pass to these opportunities is not my personal choice but a forced choice.




At least 50% of the world's dire problems seem to stem from this group of profiteers, who seem to have no conscience or soul. Prime examples of these will be the group in charge at San Lu Milk, the Madoff scam, and the sub-prime perpetrators. The repercussions of their actions will long be continued to affect all of us in some way or other.




While one group will be saying that, we the innocent affected, had in some way helped or even encouraged these profiteers. We the discerning buyers, did we not choose to save a few pennies and opted for the cheapest brands of milk? We are so savvy (greedy) that, did normal yielding investments appeal to us or we had preferred to park our funds in all the supposedly high yielding funds, investments? To add to our burden, when we we saving a few pennies or when we were getting higher yields, did we not spread the good news to our friends? So all of us, each in our own ways, had also contributed to the success of the profiteers, thereby bringing greater harm to ourselves.




For the other group, they tend to blame everyone else but themselves. They feel that these harbingers should be severely punished and putting these people to death should also be one of the options. For the perpetrators at San Lu, it was felt that death maybe even too good for them and they should actually be sentenced to death by melamine tainted milk. So that they could also suffer as many of their victims had suffered before their demise. That is, if they were found guilty. Then for those that caused irreparable financial disasters, they should be made into slaves and their next three generations as well to repay back to society the great damage they had done.


The world will continue to see more good and bad. Although devastating, the human spirit will somehow manage to always rebound and put it all behind us. That is the miracle of our resilience. The world will continue along its path and eventually, all these will be behind us one day and we will recover back to the point as if we were never affected by these incidents in the first place. Most of the time, when something that seems too good to be true, take a moment back and carefully reflect if at all that is possible without future devastation, is too good to be true. Not all will be duds and very rarely do we come across true gems as there are some genuine bargains out there. However, in my experience, true gems rarely occur and one off kind of things, not something that is offered to the masses.