#America has a long-standing a problem with the worship of wealth.
In the land of the self-made men, wealth is often naively associated to ingenuity - ignoring all the overwhelming evidence pointing to the fact that just because someone is rich it doesn't mean that they're smart.
The naive and shallow-liberal American mythology that interwines wealth with genius and merit has repeatedly put in the top positions of government and business some of the least thoughtful, least competent and lease self-aware people that the country could offer.
What the American mythology of wealth and genius often ignores is that talent exists everywhere - but opportunity doesn't.
It's privilege, not genius, that insulates foolish people from the consequences of their foolish decisions.
And yet the ultra-wealthy managed again and again to take the helm, and every single time they did, with no exceptions, it's the country as a whole (and anyone foolish enough to rely on the US as a stable partner) that paid the price of their imbecility and wickedness:
- Southern plantation oligarchs in the 1850s eventually tried to build a trans-continental authoritarian slave empire, launched a war against democracy itself, and nearly a million people died as a result.
- The oil and railway barons of the Gilded Age ended up hurting the economy as a whole and the purchasing power of Americans as a whole, and the situation only improved once Congress pushed for some of the bravest antitrust laws of the 20th century.
- The worship of wealth and financial recklessness of the Roaring Twenties, and of the earlier traders, led to the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed - and that could only be fixed by FDR's Keynesian and interventionist policies that restored the purchasing power of common citizens.
- The infamous 1971 "Powell Memo" turned almost overnight a niche economic view like the Chicago school into the only dominant economic doctrine without any form of academic validation. It ushered corporate control over education, media, public opinion, infrastructure planning, healthcare and the political system itself, it gradually forced an increasing number of Americans out of healthcare, education, housing and professional opportunities, and it culminated with the 2008-2009 financial crisis (where, again, common Americans paid the bills).
- The worship of wealth has led to two Trump terms, and all the Nazi bullshit that has come out of it.
Invariably, every single time the ultra-wealthy take the helm, America veers off the road.
And that's no surprise: extreme wealth isolates people from reality.
Studies on the wealthy show declining empathy, reduced capacity to recognize others’ emotions, and a dangerous overconfidence in their own intuition. Research on CEOs finds that around 20 percent exhibit psychopathic traits — lack of empathy, superficial charm, impulsivity — compared to about one percent of the public. These aren’t qualities that make for wise leadership.
Once wealth reaches a certain scale it becomes indistinguishable from hoarding disorder.
Billionaires don’t just accumulate money: they stockpile influence, lawmakers, media platforms, even entire political movements. They withdraw from the common good, then blame the rest of us for the social and infrastructure instability their own excesses have created.
The truth is that America has always been at its strongest when it remembers that great nations are built by great communities, not great fortunes.
When it measures character by contribution, not by bank balance. When it demands guardrails, boundaries, and democratic accountability for everyone, especially those with the most power to do the most harm.
The morbidly rich won’t police themselves. They never have.
At some point, hopefully, Americans will dismantle their mythology of wealth, and they'll stop repeating the same mistakes every two generations.
Until then, decoupling from this rogue actor fanatically attached to a rotten, fundamentalist and abhorrent idea of how to run a country or an economic system should be a civic duty.
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/billionaires/
