I often question how this world got to the point that it is at now… and I am not talking about evolution or anything like that.

I question how people became so crooked, and not even just that, but that it has also become accepted to some degree. I question how people who have money can throw it away, while there are so many people going hungry and living in poverty everyday in the United States.

I read an interesting article in The New Yorker about wine, and not just any wine but bottles that were claimed to be owned by the late President Thomas Jefferson. In 1985 Christie’s in London sold a bottle of 1787 Lafitte engraved with the initials “Th.J.” This was the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction…selling for one hundred and fifty seven thousand dollars. This bottle of wine was purchased by Christopher Forbes, the son of Malcolm Forbes, VP of Forbes Magazine.

This is where I become bothered…first off why in the world would someone spend all that money on a bottle of wine? The general response is ‘because they can’.

Bill Koch, an owner of a high profit energy company, sold his shares of his company receiving five hundred and fifty million dollars. His first thought…I can build my world class wine collection. When asked, “Why?” His response was, “Because its the best tasting form of alcohol in the world.” “That’s why.”

Wow…my mouth just dropped. I enjoy wine, and have an appreciation for this alcoholic beverage, but to spend millions of dollars on a wine collection, let alone the cost to build another wine cellar, it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Although, it made perfect sense to Bill Koch, who spent half a million dollars on four bottles of wine thought to be from Thomas Jefferson’s collection. After much investigation Koch was disappointed to find that the wine he bought was fraudulent. This led to a court battle and an uproar to say the least, in the wine auction business.

It happened that a highly reputable “wine taster”, Hardy Rodenstock, who was quoted in describing wine in books and the auction house notes, had a suit brought against him in 2006 for selling the fraudulent wine to Koch. The next thing that happen was no surprise… Christie’s in New York featured a 1934 Pétrus, describing the wine with a quote from Rodenstock. The wine was offered at twenty two hundred dollars, and went unsold.

This just shows how an unethical jerk, calling himself a business man, made off with a lot of money. Rodenstock saw the auction in 1985 as a great opportunity to take advantage of the extraordinary inflation of rare wine prices.

This is not the first case of extraordinary inflation on “priceless” items… look at famous artwork, stamps, and pieces of history. The only reason these items sell for as much as they do is because somebody with lots of money wanted to say they had this rare item, so they bid an enormous amount of money on it because they could.

It’s a vicious circle… talent criminals are motivated by the way the rich spend their money so they reproduce a rare item and sell it as the “real” thing.

Hey rich people…if none of you pay the outrageous price for items the price goes down…it’s economics my dear friend.