Picture credits:
Luis XIV, the Sun King, built the Palace of Versailles at a time when his royal subjects had increasingly difficult life. By the time of the French Revolution, just two generations later, the country had literally no bread to eat.
The breathtakingly pompous Palace of Versailles has over 1,000 rooms. Perhaps, if the Sun King cared about the misery of his people, a 500 room "modest cottage house" would have satisfied his greed. Who knows, if Versailles were built to be half the size, the distant relative of the Sun King, Luis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, could have saved their heads too.
And now, read the following headline:
The country, the "Main Street", as politicians like to refer to the plebs, struggles with ~9% unemployment and record real estate foreclosures. At the same time, CEOs received 24% higher compensation in 2010 than in 2009, to the tune of roughly $ 9 M average.
People proudly declare in this country that "greed" is the healthy fuel of the "American Way".
Is it remotely possible that just a little less greed would be an environmentally healthier fuel for that "American Way"? Perhaps even for that rarely talked about "Planet Earth Way"?
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