Give a man a bank and he can rob the world

Over the past two days, I’ve seen this clever riff on the “give a man a fish” parable pop up over and over again on various social sites, primarily Twitter and Stellar:

Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.

The earliest instance of this text I could find on Twitter was posted by @Bonoboism on Nov 28. Because it was an @reply, the original post was not widely retweeted but over the next day or so, it was posted by dozens of other people without attribution and some of those knock-off posts got hundreds and even thousands of retweets. Without looking too hard, I found tweets by @ilegal, @MrsSelfDestrukt, @owenderby, @sickipediabot, @HipstaGangsta, @ladydebidebz, @tickly, and @yourrhighness_. Tweets like this have a tendency to get appropriated by others without attribution…the temptation to appear that pithy is just too great, I guess.

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