Taking Candy from a Baby

I don't know how much stock I put in studies like this, but I found this article in Scientific American. The study found that wealthy people are significantly less considerate of others, and are much more likely to cut you off with their luxury cars. Yeah, I know this fits into the "well, duh..." category.

But the following part was especially humorous:

In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

Yes, the study shows that rich people will take candy from a baby. Shades of Montgomery Burns!

Now, we all know that some rich people are quite generous. Andrew Carnegie and Bill Gates have contributed much of the their time and money to worthy causes. When I was a kid I spent many hours at one of the libraries built by Carnegie throughout the United States and Britain. Gates has spent billions of dollars vaccinating kids in third-world countries.

But we also know that these people are by far the exception to the rule. Most of  today's wealthy are nameless brokers, bankers, hedge fund managers, CEOs and heirs who will never make any significant contribution to society.

But this isn't some abstruse academic question. Republicans are on record against compassion and empathy. When President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court he mentioned the importance of those qualities and was roundly derided by Republicans.

Why does this matter? If the people who make policy are wealthy, compassionless men like, say, Mitt Romney (who told us he likes to fire people and doesn't care about the poor), they're going to make decisions that benefit the privileged few and damn the consequences for the majority.

Everyone in this country understands this basic fact. It's one of the biggest reasons that many Republicans don't trust Romney, though they don't frame it that way. They usually characterize him as a closet liberal, but the real knock against him is that he is actually a soulless husk and will simply say anything to get elected. He doesn't really stand for anything except money and power. They know he can't relate to them and just doesn't care about them.

And when Romney endorsed the Paul Ryan budget that would give even more tax cuts to the wealthy while cutting spending for everything else but defense, he almost literally declared his support for taking candy from babies.

As the Republican nomination process cycled through the various Romney challengers, Santorum, Cain and Gingrich, the main draw wasn't the tirades about contraception and 9-9-9 and invented Palestinian peoples. No, it was these candidates' middle-class roots that so many Republican voters were attracted to. They knew the non-Romneys could better understand their lives than a guy whose wife drives a couple Cadillacs and whose only knowledge of football and NASCAR comes from his friendships with team owners.

Santorum ultimately did the best against Romney, but finally had to throw in the towel against the rising tide of cash. He represented the average Republican hope that you could start from scratch and make it to the top (though Santorum has distorted his own family history, implying that they were all destitute coal miners: in reality Santorum has always been well off, his father was a psychiatrist at VA hospital and his mother was nurse).

Romney represents the death of that hope: the Republican realization that only massive amounts of cash from Romney's cronies and multinational corporations can unseat a president who started out where where most American did and truly represents the American success story.