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Screw The Rules, I Have Money!
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alt title(s): Screw The Rules I Have Money 
"It's a shame rich megalomaniacs are immune from the law. Otherwise, we could just call the police."
The Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules.
Let's face it. Life sucks, especially when you don't have much money to your name. This goes double in the world of fiction, where those that have money always try to find ways to make things miserable for those who don't. Such things as The Power Of Love and The Power Of Friendship generally have no effect on them. As long as they have money, they can do anything... even get away with murder. Or Buy Them Off for whatever evil deeds you did commit.
See also Corrupt Corporate Executive, Screw The Rules I Have Plot and McDuck. Contrast Miser Advisor, who doesn't have the money, but "screws the rules" in order to get it. A wealthy person who adopts this attitude has a greater chance of becoming a Karma Houdini than any poor person (a fact which, sadly, isn't limited to fiction).
The Lawful Counterpart to this trope is Screw The Money I Have Rules. See also I Thought It Was Forbidden.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh! got away with a lot because of his wealth. The trope name comes from a line in the first episode of the Gag Dub Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series, which parodied this. In fact, both the line and the concept are running jokes throughout the (abridged) series.
Yugi: Wait a minute. Did you just summon a bunch of dragons in one turn?
Kaiba: Yeah, so?
Yugi: That's against the rules, isn't it?
Kaiba: Screw the rules, I have money!
- Giovanni from Pokemon gets away with this, so much so that he can personally come down to the police station and bail out Team Rocket members. In the Pokemon Adventures manga, even more so after the Saffron City incident.
- In the games, it's debatable since he's gone into hiding after Pokemon Red.
- Shirogane Ryou and Aizawa Minto from Tokyo Mew Mew are both obscenely rich, and love nothing more than to tick off Ichigo by showing off their wealth. However, they aren't all that bad.
- Shutaro Mendou in Urusei Yatsura.
- The Kunos from Ranma 1/2 are often depicted this way by fanon, although objectively other characters in the series do just as bad with fewer resources.
- Sometimes the Kunos really are this way. After steadfastly rejecting to sell a Phoenix Egg to Kuno, on the basis that it bears a terrible secret and the Phoenix Sword it bestows is too dangerous to exist, the owner of an antiques store quickly folds and sells the egg when slapped with a wad of bills.
- Kazuharu Fukuyama from Girls Bravo, mostly to be an antagonist to the milksopy but ambivalent Yukinari.
- Likewise Kentaro in Love Hina, who actually loses most of his money and becomes a comic relief gag character.
- Halekulani from Bobobobo Bobobo might be a parody of this. As a master of "Gorgeous Shinken" ("Fist of Gorgeous"), for him, money is quite literally power; his energy attacks are rated by their dollar value, and he can increase his strength by absorbing all the profits from the amusement park he owns. One of his more dangerous attacks actually turns his opponents into coins.
- In Boys Over Flowers (Hana Yori Dango), the F4 is allowed to do whatever they want at school, including harassing students they hate, just because their families donate the most money to the school. Later on, it's learned that Domyoji got away with beating a guy until his organs ruptured due to his family paying off the school and the boy's family. And later still, Domyoji's mother Kaede attempts to pay Tsukushi's family hundreds of thousands of dollars just to keep Tsukushi from dating her son.
- This trope can be attributed to Hayate The Combat Butler's Mask the Money (really Nagi wearing a Paper Thin Disguise), who often solves her problems with her vast riches (and everything else with Hayate).
- The Yakuza chasing Hayate prior to this point do an inversion of this, "She has money, obey the rules." When one less-than-intelligent member asks why they don't kill everyone anyways, aren't they Card Carrying Villains? His smarter co-worker smacks him and says No, the Yakuza leaves people who do pay them alone. That's the point.
- Shinzen Tennozou, among several other Speed Grapher characters.
- A recurrent theme in Ashita No Nadja, where lots of rich people are portrayed this way.
- Subverted with Hokuto of Cromartie High School, who transferred to Cromartie planning to indimidating everyone by threatening to get them expelled by his father, chairman of the school board... but he actually transferred to the wrong school. Not only is his father not the head of the school board, it's a municipal school and thus doesn't even have one.
- The Black Black Club from Yu Yu Hakusho runs on this trope. It reaches a peak in The Dark Tournament's third round, which one guy turns into his own little Screw-the-rules fest.
- Kakuzu from Naruto is shown to present this argument to Hidan when they go to capture a monk for a bounty. Hidan tells Kakuzu that killing a monk is a one-way ticket to hell, to which Kakuzu replies that even hell is run on money, and that he'll be fine.
- Washizu from Akagi is able to get away with several murders, though it causes him some inconvenience. The cop Yasuoka figures it's a better idea to pit him against Akagi in a high-stakes game of mahjong rather than trying to confront him by legal means.
- ...And then the "Chairman" from Kaiji kicks it up a notch, having things like a cruise ship and a hotel to use as private gambling venues, with people disappearing or getting killed at them seemingly posing no problem.
- Ai Kora has Yatsuhashi Ayame, who constantly does this, mostly to get into Maeda's pants.
- Pretty much the entire thing that drives the plot for Liar Game. The elaborate organization manages to get away with forcing billion dollar debts on people simply because it's so rich and powerful (though it also helps that none of the people bothered going to actual, real lawyers).
- In Full Metal Panic, Sousuke is allowed to violate so many laws it's not even funny while attending school. He points loaded guns at people (and sometimes even shoots at them), places landmines and bombs everywhere, destroys people's private property without remorse, makes threats filled with killer intent... all of this is ignored by the head of the school. Why? Because Mithril makes HUGE donations to her for allowing Sousuke to attend school.
- Eden Of The East features several characters with ludicrously large cash reserves and a concierge who helps them do whatever they want with it, including bribing the Prime Minister, serial murder, launching missiles at Japan, and building a nice hospital.
- Bribing the PM only cost 60 yen.
Comic Books
Film
- Biff Tannen, after traveling back in time to kill Marty McFly's dad in Back To The Future Part II, told him that they'd never convict him of murder because he "owned the police."
- "I own the police" is also attributed to notorious early 20th century gangster Al Capone, thus making this both Truth In Television and
Older Than Television(TV: 1928. "I own the police": 1929). Ironically, Capone's money (due to tax evasion) is what brought him down.
- The mean, evil banker Mr. Potter from Its A Wonderful Life, who steals George Bailey's money and goads him towards attempting suicide.
- The end scene of Small Soldiers is most likely a parody of this.
- The resolution of Chinatown revolved around this concept. It was alluded to rather blatantly in an old draft of the script, but it was removed at the behest of the director, who felt it was too obvious.
- Darwin and Minerva Mayflower from Hudson Hawk.
- Pick a James Bond villain. Any one will do.
Literature
- Lucius Malfoy from Harry Potter weaseled out of many problems thanks to his wealth and social position.
- In Lois Mc Master Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, there is an entire planet, Jackson's Whole, where any and all rules of the rest of the galaxy will be ignored for the right sum.
- Unless it personally offends one of the ruling oligarchs to the point where he'd rather take it out of your hide even if doing so hurts his profits, whereupon no amount of money can save you. Then again, those oligarchs rule precisely because they're the richest and most unscrupulous bastards in town...
- Phileas Fogg in Jules Verne's Around The World in 80 Days had a habit of throwing large volumes of money at his problems, at one point going so far as to hijack a ship and they buy it and its cargo from its owner en route to Ireland. The original owner got the hull back in the end.
- Let's face it. Edmond Dantes, Determinator or not, wouldn't have gotten far into his elaborate schemes for revenge without his eleventy billion francs. He bribed a pope. (Although maybe that was just Truth In Television for the period?)
- Artemis Fowl loves this trope. Not surprising, considering that the title character is a True Neutral Teen Genius with his entire family's fortune at his disposal.
- To wit: "We have two options; legal, and illegal [...] Illegal is faster."
- Herman di Portola Bliss of the mystery novel Impossible Bliss is highly eccentric and even more obnoxious. Though he's been arrested numerous times in his Santa Barbara hometown, he's never faced charges in court, because he's the last scion of the family that founded (and still owns much of) the town.
- The tituler character of The Great Gatsby earns his fortune for the sole reason to get with Daisy. He even thinks that he could reverse five years just because.
Live Action TV
- Law And Order often has these characters as defendants, as they usually hire the best lawyers; a Recurrer named Arthur Gold putting in an appearance is a dead giveaway. If anyone's likely to literally get away with murder on these shows, it's them.
- Gold seems to have been replaced as the go-to shyster by SVU's Lionel Granger.
- Edward Vogler in Season 1 of House starts running the hospital like an Evil Overlord, making calls about things like a dying cancer patient getting a C-Section, purely because he can threaten to withdraw a 100 million dollar donation if everybody doesn't say "How high?" whenever he says "Jump!"
- Stephanie Forrester from the Bold and the Beautiful. She has gotten away with accomplice to rape, harbouring a fugitive and accomplice-after-the-fact to murder. Among other things.
- Subversion: Much of Arrested Development centers around the Bluth family learning to (read: not being able to) deal with the fact that they can no longer screw the rules now that they have no money.
- Subversion: Future show The Philanthropist stars a guy who has money and wants to give it away to good causes in very dangerous areas... personally. "Screw the rules, I'm giving you money!"?
- Q from Star Trek. More like Screw The Rules, I'm Omnipotent, but the analogy still works.
- Subverted with Jonas Hodges of season 7 of 24. As the wealthy head of a government contract army, it is assumed he's doing what he's doing to ensure his company gets contracts. It's revealed that he actually feels he's providing a service and protecting the country. The money is actually the last thing on his mind.
Professional Wrestling
- This was WWF wrestler "The Million Dollar Man" Ted DiBiase's whole character, right down to attempting to buy the WWF World Heavyweight Championship from Hulk Hogan for one million dollars when he couldn't win it in a match (no matter how much he cheated), and then using the money to hire Andre the Giant to get it for him when Hulk refused to sell. Once that failed, he simply made his own championship belt. With diamonds. And blackjack. And hookers. OK, maybe not blackjack. His Catch Phrase was, "Everybody's got a price!"
- One of Professional Wrestling's oldest ones in the book: since (in most wrestling organizations) the champion retains through an indecisive finish, and a disqualification is defined as indecisive, many heels holding the belt will get themselves disqualified intentionally during a match in order to keep their status as champion, thus leading to the variant: "Screw the rules, I have a title!" Fans often refer to this as a "Honky Tonk Finish", after the WWF wrestler The Honky Tonk Man, who built up a 15-month reign as Intercontinental Champion by doing this repeatedly.
- John Bradshaw Layfield, a current WWE wrestler and a Real Life self-made millionaire, has essentially become an Expy of the Million Dollar Man, with additional reactionary, racist and jingoistic overtones. Imagine putting Lex Luthor, David Duke, J.R. Ewing and Bill O'Reilly in a blender, and you'll have JBL.
Tabletop Games
- In Unknown Armies, plutomancers can utilize money to bend the rules of anything including forcing people to shoot themselves, summoning any object, and dictating global economies
Theatre
- In the Sick Sad World of the Weill/Brecht opera The Rise and Fall of the City Mahagonny, Jimmy Mahoney is sentenced to death for the most heinous and foul crime of not paying his bar tab. Too bad he didn't have any money. If he'd had enough to bribe the judge, he could have gotten away with murder in cold blood, like the man who was tried just before him.
- Used in Urinetown: The Musical.
Cladwell: It wasn't just cash, Ms. Pennywise. It was an awful lot of cash.
Video Games
- Colin from the Advance Wars games has this as his CO Super Power. By hoarding up loads and loads of money, it's possible for even his weakest infantry unit to wipe out an enemy Neotank in one shot. In Advance Wars: Dual Strike, his sister, Sasha, has a CO Power (Market Crash) that pretty much comes as close to screwing the rules as any CO Power in the game by actually lowering the enemy's CO Power meter by an amount decided by how much money you have.
- Also, neither of these CO powers use up the money that they run on, so you can use them repeatedly, each time the effects thereof growing stronger (provided you don't spend more money on a turn than the next one will replace).
- Just to make Colin's power even scarier, bear in mind that he has a 20% price cut on all his troops at the expense of some combat power. So he can get his neotanks for only a little more than his enemy is buying their heavy tanks. Zerg Rush is scary enough, but it becomes really scary when the "Zerglings" are doing 300% of your health in damage.
- The "Montana Legal" upgrade in Scarface: The World is Yours slows police response times to half the pre-upgrade speed, giving Tony Montana some much-needed time to carry out his questionable deeds. Interestingly, in the original film, it was attempting to evade tax for his considerable profits that started Tony's downfall.
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan from Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. His only goal is to conquer the Fiction500 rankings... but what if a law prevents him from doing so? No sweat! He just pays his lobby groups and bribes the local legislators to have it changed.
- And one of the winning conditions for the game is to take over the global economy.
- Resident Evil 4. The rocket launcher. Able to One Hit Kill anything in the game. The downside? It's expensive (thus this trope), has only one use, and takes up an assload of inventory space until you do use it. Generally used to skip the player's personal One Boss.
- And then you unlock and buy the Infinite Launcher, which is more expensive but takes up no more space. You can guess how many shots you get with it...
- The Fugger 2 lets you play a merchant in the 17th century who slowly increases their influence over the country. From controlling the courts over rewriting the law to building up an army of robbers (and even laying siege to cities), nothing is impossible as long as you can pay.
- It is possible to completely avoid the fight with Mephistopheles at the end of Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark and get different endings by obtaining knowledge of his True Name. The one person who can tell it to you will give it up for the small fee of 600,000 gold pieces.
- It sounds big, but you can definitely scrounge up more than that over the course of the game without cheating.
- In Final Fantasy X not only can you bribe monsters (including some bosses) into leaving you alone, but also into giving you items.
- And then there's the Aeon Yojimbo who you recruit by haggling an astronomic ammount of money and the damage of whose attacks are based on how much money you pay him before each attack. He can even kill any enemy (even bosses) in one hit if you pay him enough (though the amount scales with how powerful the enemy is, of course).
- Slight subversion in that case, choosing the correct conversation option when you recruit him means he'll still pull out his one hit kill even when you only pay him 1 gil, so maxing out his speed makes him a bit of a game breaker.
- Armacham corporation in FEAR
- Ratchet generally only survives whatever it is he's gotten involved with because he can buy guns significantly larger than himself.
Western Animation
- C. Montgomery Burns, Springfield's resident centenarian and lone plutocrat, once tried to block out the sun just for laughs, shrugs off serious allegations and charges with money and bribes, but still indulges in that joyful pastime of stealing candy from babies, with both disastrous results and hilarious consequences.
- He did it because, as the owner of the town's only electric company, he'd earn more money if people had their lights on all day, which they wouldn't do as long as they got free light from the sun.
- Princess Morbucks from The Powerpuff Girls.
- Remy Buxaplenty on The Fairly Oddparents. The fact that Butch Hartman was picked on by rich kids in high school has absolutely nothing to do with the character's horribly exaggerated portrayal, really.
- Timmy, meanwhile, may have an infinite amount of magical wishes at his fingertips, but he actually doesn't have infinite magical wealth at his fingertips, as shown in one episode where he wishes for a large sum of money so he can get tickets to a concert, only to find out that it's against the rules- the fairies did their research, and don't want to cause too much inflation.
- Montana Max from Tiny Toon Adventures. He uses his vast wealth to push the other characters around, and owns heavily polluting industries that make inane things like ice cream spoons and portable holes.
- The Boondocks has Ed Wuncler III, whose father owns everything in town and will never be arrested or prosecuted for anything. Riley even said "you're lucky your granddad owns the police" after a badly botched bank robbery. Ed's partner Gin Rummy denied it works that way, and claimed they got away with it "because I am a criminal mastermind"... right before a cop comes by to return Ed's wallet from the scene of the crime.
- His grandfather Ed Sr. isn't much better. In one episode, he converts a health food restaurant into a soul food restaurant (firing all the employees except the illegal Mexicans in the process) in order to drive down property values in the area and convince the city to sell him a public park. In another episode, he uses a pony (which may not actually ever have existed) as leverage to perform a hostile takeover of Jazmine's lemonade stand.
- Vlad Masters from Danny Phantom fits this trope. In fact, about the only thing he can't buy is the Green Bay Packers.
- And Maddie. Can't forget that.
- Or Danny. He can't buy Danny's love (No, not THAT kind of love, sorry Vlad/Danny shippers) either.
- David Xanatos of Gargoyles. His introduction to viewers included the phrase "Pay a man enough and he'll walk barefoot into hell." The guy owns everything, all the shiny toys, all the best lawyers, everything. A fan joke is that Xanatos is so rich, he could afford to pay all the people necessary to say "hell" in a children's cartoon series. A DISNEY children's cartoon series no less. For the record, the lack of parental guardians and other outrage was all part of his plan.
- Not to mention having eleven tropes named after him. Now that's cash.
- However, the part of his character development is the realization that not everything can be solved by money.
- In Hercules: The Animated Series, the king of Atlantis, Croesus, bribes Hades and the Fates to prevent losses following a prophecy involving his city sinking. In the end, Atlantis sinks, complete with Hades delivering his check back, allegating "your bank went under". Another episode has Adonis delivering checks to all before him in a queue to get attended quickly - three times!
- There was an episode of Duck Tales in which a nightmare version of the boys' Uncle Scrooge tells them, "I'm RICH! I can do ANYTHING!!"
- The main characters of Metalocalypse have this in its ultimate incarnation: "Screw the rules, the world economy would fail without us!" One episode also featured a movie producer rich enough to push even Dethklok around.
Real Life
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