Be Average. That's good enough.

 This NYT article about the Dutch v. Jeff Bezos.  

Here's the beginning of the story:

One recent afternoon, Mr. Lewis was standing near the Hef, as the Koningshaven Bridge is affectionately known, and explaining the anger that Mr. Bezos and Oceanco, the maker of the three-masted, $500 million schooner, inspired after making what may have sounded like a fairly benign request. The company asked the local government to briefly dismantle the elevated middle span of the Hef, which is 230 feet tall at its highest point, allowing the vessel to sail down the King’s Harbor channel and out to sea. The whole process would have taken a day or two and Oceanco would have covered the costs.

But the Dutch were so angered about the dismantling of the bridge, which is also a monument, that they threatened to egg the boat as it went by.

“There’s a principle at stake,” said Mr. Lewis, a tall, bearded 37-year-old who was leaning against his bike and toggling during an interview between wry humor and indignation. He then framed the principle with a series of questions. “What can you buy if you have unlimited cash? Can you bend every rule? Can you take apart monuments?”

“The Dutch like to say, ‘Acting normal is crazy enough,’” said Ellen Verkoelen, a City Council member and Rotterdam leader of the 50Plus Party, which works on behalf of pensioners. “And we think that rich people are not acting normal. Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think ‘Be average.’ That’s good enough.”

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’”

At school, Ms. Verkoelen learned from friends that the American children in their homes all ate the same way. They were stunned and a little jealous. At the time, it was said in the Netherlands that putting both butter and cheese on your bread was “the devil’s sandwich.” Choose one, went the thinking. You don’t need both.

“Calvin teaches that you’re given stewardship over your money, that you have a responsibility to take care of it, which means giving lots of it away, being generous to others,” said James Kennedy, a professor of modern Dutch history at Utrecht University. “Work is a divine calling for which you will be held accountable. It’s considered bad for society and bad for your soul if you spend in ostentatious ways.”

There are billionaires in the Netherlands and a huge pay gap between chief executives and employees. Statista, a research firm, reported that for every dollar earned by an average worker, C.E.O.s earned $171. (The figure is $265 in the United States, the widest gap of any country.) The difference is that the rich in the Netherlands don’t flaunt it, just as the powerful don’t highlight their cachet. The Dutch once ran one of the world’s largest empires but there’s a certain pride here that the prime minister of the country rides a bicycle to pay visits to the king — yes, the Netherlands has a royal family, which is also relatively low-key — and locks the bicycle outside the palace.