And if someone doesn't like their stolen painting after a while, there are plenty of dealers who will hook you up with a similarly amoral buyer. The fee is higher, to go with the risk.

There's an entire class of rich people who sometimes go by the label "globalist" who believe they are above national laws, and nations, themselves. They see themselves as "citizens of the world" and sometimes even think they shouldn't need passports to travel because their egos tell them they're so fabulous, and have the money to back it up.

I read a magazine or newspaper article about it last year. Many of them attend that big meeting of super-rich people and the politicians they've bought in Davos each year.

well, I technically don't disagree with them there..

> ... and by then, time has laundered their provenance.

This is poetry. <3

But I'm not sure it's entirely outlandish. The buyer just spins a story to the judge: "the dealer said he could acquire a van Gogh from someone's private collection, I loved its appearance, so I paid them to do that." The buyer could insist the dealer said the painting was unnamed, that they would have had no way of ever knowing it was the same one stolen from a museum, etc. (That they certainly never bothered to take a photo and upload it to Google Image Search because why would they?)

To complicate things even further, you can even say you assumed it was a different original version. Just Google "multiple versions of van gogh" and you'll see that the artist would make multiple versions of the same painting.

Obviously the buyer in this case does know what going on -- they initiated the whole thing. But as long as there are no records of communication and the dealer has been paid off to take the fall, they can play dumb in front of a judge if it ever came to that. With a good lawyer, they might very well get away with playing the victim.

But that story just beggars belief. Sure it's a story, but one that makes no sense at all unless you're willing to entertain the ludicrous premise that someone would steal painting just to sell it as a cheaper replica. Furthermore, a professional art dealer could probably be expected to be able to tell the difference between a replica and a genuine painting. Otherwise, who would buy genuine paintings from him?

I think a prosecutor would be able to quickly identify an individual in the chain of custody who clearly should have known the painting was stolen, and is thus be guilty of receiving stolen property:

https://www.criminaldefenselawyer.com/crime-penalties/federa...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hustle_episodes#Series...

Hustle, S08E02: "Picasso Finger Painting"

Ash and Mickey have tried to capitalise on the theft of a rare Picasso by selling a fake to a well-known collector, Petre Sava (Peter Polycarpou), a vicious Eastern European gangster. They learn too late that Sava who owned the stolen original. Mickey is taken prisoner by Sava, leaving Ash and the others with just a few hours to return the real stolen painting, otherwise Mickey is a dead man. With their usual contacts unable to give any clues, except only the word that a Scottish crew were behind the theft, the gang visit renowned Picasso forger Dolly Hammond (Sheila Hancock) (the one who helped to create the fake). She points them in the direction of the McCrary brothers, the thieves in question, and are told that they stole the original painting for another renowned gangster, Harry Holmes (Martin Kemp). Time is ticking and Mickey is edging closer to death; if the group can't find the real painting, Ash will have to devise a plan that can get him back...

This. Art thieves don't care for conservation, they are just extremely opportunistic. I expect this is just one instance we learnt of, simply because of the author's name being known to the mainstream. There is probably much more stuff getting stolen right now in Italy and Spain, which we won't know about for months or years - or even at all, unless we read specialist media.

That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?

> massive leveling up of standards of living

For who? Impoverished workers in China and India? How have American labourers benefitted from globalism and Keynesian economics? They haven't, at least not in the last 50 years.

> That aside, how should something like your subjective notion of "disgusting" levels of wealth guide how much of what they earned people should be able to keep?

I think you're just pretending you're naive, but you can feel free to look up many of the proposed solutions. UBI, wealth tax, limits on how much money can be passed through inheritance, etc. There are many solutions that have been _proposed_, but the problem is that with massive wealth comes massive power, and the individuals who possess disgusting levels of wealth will never let these solutions come to be.

> what they earned

Jeff Bezos has not earned 100 billion dollars. You could probably convince me that he's earned at least 1 billion dollars, but there is absolutely no way one man can generate that much wealth in one lifetime. He has stolen his wealth through asymmetrical agreements with powerless individuals, who chose to work for him rather than starve due to a lack of accessible jobs.

We've created a system that makes individuals dependent on large corporations for healthcare and rent, and then we wonder why poor individuals can't start businesses or change jobs freely (hint hint, it's due to food security and access to healthcare). If I point a gun at you and take your money, I haven't earned anything, have I? But if I starve you out, and tell you you can't see a doctor, then I can rob you of the value of your ideas and labor. For some reason our system allows that.

Bezos got a $300k interest-free loan from his mother to start his business. Are you telling me he earned that? No, it was given to him by birthright, and it's a luxury the vast majority of people don't have.

Bezos did not earn 100 billion dollars, he stole it.

Owning shares of something isn’t the same as liquid cash. And valuing 1 share at the most recent market closing price the same as a founder liquidating their whole investment is also nonsense.

FYI, all those worlds richest lists are clickbait.

Oh, so that's how you're going to handwave this argument today. Got it, I wouldn't have bothered writing all of that up if I knew you were just going to stick your head in the sand.

Here's what happens when your boy Bezos gets too much power:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-30/amazon-wo...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dmeka/whole-foods-employ...

There need to be more checks and balances on individuals who possess this much power, or they need not be allowed to attain so much power in the first place. Your technicalities do nothing to fix this problem which affect tens of thousands of workers in this country, who are being forced to expose themselves to a deadly virus (or go hungry) so Bezos can buy another mansion and bang some more models. But I don't care that much, I suppose. If it isn't done democratically it won't be long before heads are rolling.