Money can't buy some gifts I greatly enjoy, such as seeing nasty people get their comeuppance.
Schadenfreude can't begin to describe my pleasure at news of the arrest of self-styled ultra capitalist, "world's most eligible bachelor" and "world's most hated man" Martin Shkreli, a Christmas gift more welcome than a ton of Swiss chocolate.
God exists, you have to say, what with the reason for the season. There is indeed an almighty finger that points to the greedy through the clouds and gives them the flick - though not half often enough.
Shkreli will contest the fraud and conspiracy charges against him, but for now we can gloat over the fact that the 32-year-old brat who jacked up the price of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill has been handcuffed just this once, anyway, and led away by the FBI. The ugly face of capitalism turned repulsive when he said he should have raised the price even more.
It's a shame the current charges don't relate to his price gouging, but I'm grateful for any banana skin lying in his path.
"No one wants to say it, no one's proud of it, but this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system, and capitalism rules," he said this month. Never was a greed-is-good statement by the 1 per cent of America that owns virtually all its wealth better articulated.
The drop in his company's share value fell by more than 50 per cent when he was arrested, then its trading was suspended. That's good. Shareholders, who benefit from his amorality, shouldn't be allowed to pretend they're not implicated.
Not so long ago moneygrubbers like Shkreli were the subjects of regular grovelling profiles and business stories on the basis that they made a lot of money and were therefore interesting. We've now seen too many of them fall to join in the hymns of adoration.
Bill Gates is more like a model capitalist, if such a thing can be. At least he and his wife have dedicated the bulk of their fortune to good works to benefit others, and the fact that they've done so without pious avowals of the religion of their fancy makes them all the more commendable. Few things can be as annoying as being preached to by the rich, as if they've died and grown wings already.
Christmas is the season of crassness as well as goodwill, and so a row has erupted in Italy over the building of a Father Christmas Village on the flanks of Monte Cassino, site of one of the toughest battles of World War II. On its peak is a Benedictine abbey where Nazis were holed up at the time. Today the abbey has leased the land to a local businessman, the abbot seeing no harm in "bringing joy" to children and their parents.
Looming over the festive tat is an obelisk commemorating more than 1000 Polish troops buried there, and the Poles are of course offended. Surely the sacrifice of their lives in the cause of fighting fascism means the dead soldiers are entitled to be left in peace, at least until everyone has forgotten all about them, and the war, and the inevitable McDonald's opens. That fate awaits us all, but if the abbot is right we'll at least bring joy to the chubby children of the future, who'll neither know nor care who lies beneath their plastic playgrounds and joyful childish chunder. It wouldn't be Christmas without a dig at the royals, and this time it's the Duchess of Cambridge, whose "friends" report that she has turned the family home into a temple of Christmas kitsch. There are flashing tree lights, tons of tinsel, and two Christmas trees, apparently.
How shocking. I may never get over the fact that she sounds just like everybody else.