Myochin School
Japanese, active late 19th century
Articulated Dragon
(c. 1880)

"With successes like that, who really requires failure?"

You might have noticed the very wealthy, the billionaire class, reliably behaving preposterously. This behavior highlights a key dichotomy between wealth and Prosperity. While wealth requires control of vast financial resources, Prosperity doesn’t, or doesn’t necessarily require great wealth. It might be easier, stealing this metaphor from the Bible, for any run-of-the-mill camel to pass through a needle’s eye than for the extremely wealthy to ever experience Prosperity, or so their public behavior suggests. Prosperity seems to be mostly mindset, and only partly contingent on possessing anything resembling excess wealth.

Just look at what the very wealthy tend to do when encountering a budget, for instance. Their a priori notion of managing a budget appears to involve cutting it. A bad budget is one that has not yet been ravaged. They insist that they’re only eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse, as if any budget would just naturally include hefty percentages of these. By definition, it seems, anything they deem necessary to cut must represent waste, fraud, or abuse, which, of course, couldn’t possibly be the case. The wealthy thrive on such presumptions because they are not dependent upon allocations from any budgeting process. They serve as doctors who’ve never suffered from the disease they specialize in treating. They therefore seem to lack an essential empathy and understanding of the suffering those not blessed or cursed by wealth experience.

The DOGE experiment conducted in 2025 using public money perfectly illustrated great wealth’s relationship to budgets. After much fuss and considerable feathers, they managed to cut untold billions from government budgets, but somehow spent much more than their efforts saved. This result seemed like magic. They savaged good works for disappointing headlines, then played all innocent because their motives were noble, or as noble as the billionaire class ever seems to appear, for they were after waste, fraud, and abuse. Unsurprisingly, they became what they pursued, exemplifying waste, fraud, and abuse in their own actions. Their results were lost to them, for the very wealthy only rarely seem to suffer the consequences of any of their actions, especially the particularly petty ones.

Prosperity must be shared to manifest. Those who spend their lives seeking to cut their taxes forfeit the opportunity to ever become Prosperous, because Prosperity demands a radically different focus. Rather than insist that one’s wealth is their asset, the Prosperous perceive it as more of a contingent liability, deadly unless in continual circulation. Should wealth be seen as a store, a personal possession, the resulting obsession renders its owner worse off than the poorest pauper, for they could have kept Prosperity in circulation instead of employing it as a form of social strangulation. The obligation to widely share one’s good fortune amplifies Prosperity rather than smothering it. The Prosperous seem to understand that their wealth comes with obligation. It comes into their hands because those hands can more effectively direct it to where it can do more good, as if merely possessing it would smother its owner. It might.

The finest artwork ever produced was funded by patrons, people who funneled their wealth into the hands of gifted paupers. Taxes funded lavish public constructions for the good of everyone rather than merely for the pleasure of any landed gentry. Prosperity is a convective institution, endlessly circulating itself around. The wealthy that have yet to figure out this fundamental principle might be best thought of as PreProsperous, for they have not yet crossed that point where their wealth transforms itself into shared Prosperity. Until then, they will obsess on cutting taxes and savage every budget that comes into their focus. They will insist that they’re eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse when they’re actually, in practice, encouraging its most insidious form, undermining possibilities for Prosperity to flourish. Such success mirrors the old adage that success tends to visit the wrong people. With successes like that, who really requires failure?

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz