"LIFE is a game, and money is how we keep score, " Donald Trump is famed for saying.

Like much else in the life of 'The Donald', it steals credit for someone else's work with all the class of your local pimp.

Trump is the guy who keeps three beauty queens on his payroll living (when not in rehab) in an apartment adjoining his penthouse.

Trump thinks Gordon Gekko was a wuss. Trump is the poster boy for rich-list capitalism, something with roughly the same relationship to wealth, work and worth that pornography has to love.

Financial porn isn't done well in Ireland . . . no more than its sexual analogue . . . as RTE demonstrated last week with its Irish Rich List programme, drawn from theSunday Times list that comes out each April.

Out goes presenter Craig Doyle to chat with those on "the list", mugging for camera with Old Rich Dude in front of helicopter . . . both participants in this unnatural act of lucre love looking as authentic and comfortable as Hans asking the buxom blonde receptionist if her copier needs fixing.

Though real porn is mercifully free of commentary (though I imagine a director's cut DVD of Debbie Does Dallas will have it if there isn't one already), it is essential for financial porn, so pundits of many stripes are drafted in.

Like the Sunday Times columnist and sometime Fine Gael activist Sarah Carey, enthusing about Denis O'Brien, her former employer at Esat . . . she "worked on" the second mobile license bid . . .

and is, according to her blog, her "hero". As always, the poised Carey put in a witty and creditable performance, probably because she's too smart not to understand the absurdity of the whole vulgar show.

And vulgar it is . . . the league table of the premiership of vulgarity. Not necessarily the people on it, mind you, so much as the process itself . . . which produces Donald Trump.

Trump is enamoured with the Forbes 400, the original rich list, commissioned by Malcolm Forbes in 1981. Forbes was desperate to one-up a rival, because the Forbes list of top companies had been displaced by the Fortune 500.

Forbes decided instead to try and assemble a list of richest individuals.

Which begged a fundamental question of how you come up with such a list. To the list of things you never want to see being made . . . laws, sausages, porn films . . . add rich lists.

The truly rich don't want to be on a list. They worry they'll be targets for kidnappers and terrorists . . . not to mention revenue inspectors. So you cobble together what information you can from various public sources and then you, erm, guess. Is Sean Mulryan really worth exactly 1m more than Gerard O'Hare? Of course not. It's complete bollocks.

Perverse incentives kick in and you get characters desperate to be on the list. In 1981 it was Las Vegas performers seeking to seem richer to their creditors than they actually were.

A quarter-century later Donald Trump does the same thing. New York Times reporter Timothy O'Brien revealed earlier this year why Trump gets so much out of the list. He's billed by Forbes as a billionaire and gets cachet from investors, TV producers and publishers.

How does Forbes know property magnate Trump isn't spoofing? He tells Forbes he's a billionaire. They take him at his word. It suits both parties.

I would be loath to suggest that sort of thing would be possible with the Sunday Times list, which I'm sure is the soul of propriety that has maintained its high standards since Kevin Cahill compiled the first ST rich list in 1989.

Cahill did it to expose the staggering inequalities in British land ownership . . . 1% of population owns 70% of the land . . . and I'm sure, somewhere in Rupert Murdoch's brain, something more than financial porn is the goal.

"To die rich is to die disgraced, " robber baron industrialist Andrew Carnegie (he of the libraries here in Ireland) was famed to have said. Andrew Mellon, Bill Gates, Ted Turner, Richard Branson and Warren Buffet followed his example. So did Henry Ford, whose maxim was nicked by The Donald in the quote above.

It's time we found another way to keep score. One that recognises greatness in giving, more than mere gain.

As Forbes himself opined before his death, "People's wealth and worth are very rarely related."