Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, September 16, 1993                   TAG: 9309160074
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WE'LL JUST HAVE LIVE WITHOUT A TRILLIONAIRE

A: The closest thing to a trillionaire is the Sultan of Brunei, who has 165 Rolls Royces and a net worth estimated at $37 billion. He's the world's richest person. We would love to know what gives him the most pleasure: the money, the Rollses, or the right to be called "Sultan."

First let's deal with the fundamental issue of why, in the world governed by free enterprise, no one could own everything. Even if you owned all the machines in all the factories, and owned all the land and all the bridges, there'd be one thing you couldn't own: The labor of other people. You can own the things that labor produces, but you have to pay for the labor, and that adds up - in fact, labor accounts for about 75 percent of the measurable output of a competitive economy, says Laurence Kotlikoff, professor of economics at Boston University.

"Even if you owned all the capital in the world, you'd still only receive about a quarter of the total income," he says.

Sorry to dash your hopes.

Now, as for why no one's a trillionaire:

1. Death. People die before they make that much, and then their wealth is spread out among heirs. The John D. Rockefeller fortune is still out there, bigger than ever, but more spread out, and so being a Rockefeller isn't what it used to be - you find them selling pencils on the corner, practically.

2. Government policy. The progressive income tax and antitrust laws were direct responses to the obscene fortunes of the robber barons. "The moment you become too big, you become a target and society starts changing the rules to limit your power," says Barry Bosworth, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

3. Sentiment. The grossly rich often lose their zest for making more money - there is a limit to how much one can actually consume, in terms of cars and vacations and caviar. They decide that wealth isn't the most important thing in life - there's also self-aggrandizement. Hence, philanthropists.

But the main reason no one's a trillionaire is:

4. Market forces. Take the Sultan of Brunei. He can't raise his oil prices because there are other oil producers. If he and the other producers form a cartel, they might raise prices, but OPEC discovered that this doesn't work in the long run, because it creates an incentive for conservation and the creation of alternative fuels.

Let's say you want to invest your money. The stock market, over time, has provided a return of about 7 percent a year in real dollars. Good, but hardly good enough to turn a billion into a trillion.

Q: Why does the Devil have horns and a tail and cloven hooves?

A: The Bible doesn't reveal, at any point, what the Devil looks like. So you might say that the horns and tail and all that are just in our imagination.

In fact, the Bible doesn't mention the Devil, or Satan, very often. The serpent in the Garden of Eden is sometimes thought of as being Satan, but that's not in the text of Genesis itself; it is an interpretation from the New Testament. The most famous appearances of the Devil are in the Gospels, when he tempts Jesus, and in the Book of Job, when he and God make their famous wager on whether Job will renounce his faith. But there's nothing in there about tails or horns or hooves or, egad, a pitchfork.

That imagery might be taken from Greek mythology, specifically the god Pan, the half-man, half-goat, says Alice Bellis, an Old Testament scholar at the Howard University School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. Christianity supplanted paganism as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Medieval illuminators of demonic figures may have lifted features from pagan gods.

- Washington Post Writers Group