Success Quote by Paul Getty

For a man who became a shorthand for oil-soaked wealth, Paul Getty’s line lands like a dry chuckle with a warning label. “Of course” does heavy lifting: it’s the patrician shrug of someone pretending to describe the weather while quietly pointing to the storm system. The dash-bracketed aside (“can - and do -”) mimics the cadence of a businessman closing a deal: not hypothetical, not ideological, just operational reality. Government isn’t framed as a moral agent here; it’s a machine with a lever, and the rich are simply within reach of the handle.

The intent is partly defensive, partly instructive. Getty is normalizing a truth elites often deny in public and plan for in private: states extract revenue where it’s easiest to find and hardest to hide. “Soak” is the key tell. It’s slangy, slightly resentful, the word you use when you want taxation to sound like a mugging rather than membership dues. That choice turns policy into predation, encouraging the reader to see the affluent as targets, not beneficiaries of the legal order that protects property, contracts, and markets.

Context matters: Getty’s lifetime spans the expansion of the modern tax state, wartime and postwar revenue demands, and recurring waves of populist pressure. In that world, money doesn’t just buy comfort; it buys exposure. The subtext is a playbook: diversify, shelter, move, lobby, anticipate. It’s less a complaint than a cool-eyed acknowledgment that political power periodically remembers where the cash is.