Yeah, the opening scene is kind of nasty for just for the shock value, I guess, but I do not have much of a vivid imagination for such scenes, so it didn’t really affect me at all… but it really set the pace, I guess, for what the author can put in scenes… 
I think I recall a discussion about this here… is it about the land tax proposal?
In any case, feel free to open a discussion about anything philosophical, there is, after all a relevant thread for them:
It is a topic that contains a lot of interesting ideas and discussions. 
If it is about the land tax, there are plenty.
That’s the main reason why we have economic systems in the first place.
It is a need that most people have and it needs to be adressed in a civil way (after all, if you get your hands on a fortune, you need to institutionalise a way to keep your hands on it for as long as possible 
), so that there can be a “civil society”…