Ayn Rand: Why Wall Street And Capitol Hill Are Stuffed With Psychopaths

Recovering Republican activist Mike Lofgren wonders if America’s super-rich have in essence seceded from the rest of the country:

It was in 1993 during Congressional deliberation over the North American Free Trade Agreement. I was having lunch with a staffer for one of the rare Republican members of Congress who opposed the policy of so-called free trade. I distinctly remember something my colleague said: “The rich elites of this country have far more in common with their counterparts in London, Paris and Tokyo than with their own fellow American citizens.”

This is why they do things like this:

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension – and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call, who cares about Medicare?

To some degree, the rich have always secluded themselves from the gaze of the common herd; for example, their habit for centuries has been to send their offspring to private schools. But now this habit is exacerbated by the plutocracy’s palpable animosity toward public education and public educators, as Michael Bloomberg has demonstrated. To the extent public education “reform” is popular among billionaires and their tax-exempt foundations, one suspects it is as a lever to divert the more than one-half trillion dollars in federal, state and local education dollars into private hands, meaning themselves and their friends.(ii) A century ago, at least we got some attractive public libraries out of Andrew Carnegie. Noblesse oblige like Carnegie’s is presently lacking among our seceding plutocracy.

What could be responsible for this heightened sense of contempt the hyper-rich, the Wall Street crowd, and their Congressional go-fers feel for their victims — a contempt that some have tagged as sociopathic?

This parody post offers up a clue with a parody Ayn Rand discussing with L. Ron Hubbard how to set up the world’s worst prank:

“What’s the worst prank you could possibly pull?” he wanted to know. I can still see those piggy little eyes glinting while he said it. He was an ugly man. I have no idea how I ended up with him. But he asked the question a few times, and I didn’t really have much of a reply. Until one day, the answer just came to me.

“The worst thing you could do would be to somehow take the most terrible people in the world, and make them even greater douches than they already are. Find a way to zero in on all of their ugliest faults and vices, and just… just amp them up beyond belief. That would be something.”

Which is a pretty accurate description of Objectivism.