This was, of course, before the dark arts of accountancy and finance moved the accumulation of wealth from an activity approved in the Old Testament to a craft whose main purpose is to cheat the government of the day and thus to take from one's fellow citizens. The truly wealthy people in the world are not those who work hardest or create a better mousetrap or compose great music, but rather those who can pay shysters to hide doubtfully gotten gains in a metre thickness of musty documentation.

Shaw, of course, loved to attract attention by making statements that appear to throw logic on its head, using humour to reveal a truth that appears frivolous until you examine it. A modern example of the same kind of thing was Paul McNamee's proposal that players who lose in the first round of the Australian Open Tennis should be paid three times as much as they are currently receiving.

The difference, however is that he was serious. It appears that whatever number of thousands of dollars these champions are paid is too small to stop them becoming tempted towards match fixing. So you encourage Shaw's "practice of virtue" by paying them three times as much, ignoring the fact that they lost.

Whether McNamee's suggestion would stop the drift that seems to be taking tennis closer to world championship wrestling is another question and may well ignore the widespread modern belief that wealth accumulation is a human right. It also may ease the concerns of those who worry that tennis seems to be over-represented by participants from a geographical region where the Olympic movement has cast grave doubts on the bona fides of athletes.

But to return again to the happy congruence of McNamee and Shaw. Consider the attendance of politicians at party fundraisers or polo matches or property auctions. If we paid these people who work on our behalf three times as much as we currently pay them, then they would not need to dip into our pockets for taxis and business class airfares and hotel accommodation. The perks that they pay themselves continue for many years after they cease to be our servants, but I'm sure there are many clever people in the growth industry of public relations who could give us good reasons for continuing this custom and paying them even more.

Such an increase in politician welfare would have a number of positive results. For example, think of the many exponents of the dark arts mentioned above who would need to be employed to explain to the politicians how they can structure their affairs so that they pay only a nominal amount of tax in the way that international companies do. Not to mention the legal eagles who would make a packet defending them before other legal eagles when some farmer or bricklayer or child minder squealed about inequality.

Mention of children reminds us of the many of those little angels in the kind of detention that brings tears to our sensitive eyes because it was not their fault that they broke into someone's house or stole a car or wrecked a jewellery store. We all know that these acts of entrepreneurship were necessary because they were not given any money by the government to buy things they might like.

The theory is that if we were to give them a small weekly living stipend, the kind of thing proposed by Thomas Paine as Universal Basic Income (UBI), they would behave themselves. In time, some well-meaning social worker could say that UBI is too small and should be increased threefold, citing tennis as a precedent.

So we come back to Shaw's little piece of pleasantry that seemed to tie morality with income. It may have been different a century ago when he wrote it, but it is clear that the inverse does not apply today: the mere possession of wealth does not imply moral probity. You and I could give many examples of wealthy villains, and are held back from doing so only by a fussy editor ordering us to stop right here.

Frank O'Shea is a Melbourne writer.