KEY POINTS:
Over the years I've been a bit of a bore spruiking the wealth-creation-is-good message. You know, entrepreneurs are not Dr Evils who wear barbed wire next to their skin and enjoy drowning kittens. They create jobs and increase living standards, drone, drone.
It sounds kind of stale now the chattering classes wear Huffer and drink 42 Below. But 20 years ago, when being a lawyer was the most impressive career choice you could make, one was obliged to be tub-thumping about business heroes to make up for the prevailing anti-commerce snobbery.
I've always had a rather benign view of capitalism - I forget about robber barons and the Rockefellers and go back to first principles: it's about making and flogging stuff.
Unreconstructed lefties like Chris Trotter will splutter, but most people who start businesses have the enthusiasm kids bring to childhood projects. Scary monster kids, who aren't afraid to make a big, big mess - like we were. My brother, sister and I loved building (three-storey tree house, a Barbie bathroom), organising things (cataloguing every book in the house) and creating elaborate theatrical productions with details right down to flying contraptions and greasepaint made from mushed-up pastels mixed with Vaseline on my brother Nick's microscope slides.
We also used to play such epic games of Monopoly that we devised Monopoly chequebooks when our deals got too big for the game's cash supply.
I've always tried to see tycoons as grownups who have hung on to these mad passions rather than stunted individuals obsessed with money or status. On a rainy day they would prefer to imagine a new world - c'mon people, let's build an underground lair! - than sit about playing PlayStation and whining.
But reading the NBR Rich List which came out last week reminded me my adulation of loaded go-getters is really a bit deluded.
Not all wealth-creators are Really Useful Engines. And not all of them are adding to the country's sense of wellbeing and enlightenment. I just did my own totting up of this year's Rich List and, frankly, there wasn't a lot of mad passion.
The biggest grouping by far (65 out of 169) are tycoons who have made their money from property or by financial jiggery-pokery.
Sure, some property developers are interested in the creativity of what they do - Nigel McKenna, say, or Peter Cooper.
But most are only interested in their balance sheets and are dour types to boot.
I find it hard to see the childlike creativity of Michael Friedlander, Doug Somers-Edgar, David Richwhite or Mark Bryers.
I have spent years telling journalism students that businesspeople aren't boring - but sorry, kids, sometimes they are.
And the achievements of this group hardly warrant the same kudos as entrepreneurs like electric fence-maker Bill Gallagher or whiteware guru Gary Paykel.
If you cut the Rich List down to only the people who actually export something, it would be less than one third of the size; 51 of 169 entries by my admittedly rumpty classification system.
The exporters group is mainly well known names like George Fistonich, Brian Peace, Peter Maire, Peter Jackson and Sam Morgan.
But I betcha some of them made neat tree houses when they were kids.
