Is the American economy undergoing a historic readjustment from powerhouse to a ne’er-do-well nation down at the heel, on the brink of social trouble with a financial aristocracy thumbing its nose at vast legions of the working poor?

 

It may well be.

 

And if it is, this decline stems in large part from one simple source – what I like to call holier-than-thou-art economics, a false notion in which the rich are seen as unfailingly good and the not-so-rich and poor are suspects of unworthiness, or as one politician put it recently, “whiners.”

 

The false equation of wealth with virtue emanates from the self-importance of those who have lobbied Congress for decades to let them go to any extremes to make higher profits. Their logic runs that those who make money are smarter, wiser, better than those who do not.

 

Such companies and people must believe that their wealth and social status exempts them from ever doing anything felonious or unethical, that there are no cheats and liars in the business classes.

 

Self-enamored financial aristocrats behave as if the rich aren’t a risk to other people, and that only the poor and the middle class should be scrutinized, audited and governed.

 

In a matter of weeks this month and last, the American economy has been deflated, losing its vitality and self-confidence by exposure to companies who considered themselves entitled, unlike the rest of us, to do business, largely with other people’s money, free of any constraints.

 

You can trust us, they’ve said through their lobbyists. We’re too rich to behave badly, too rich to take the same kinds of risks regular people have to take, too rich to be wrong.

 

Their lobbying dollars have convinced, cajoled, or flat out bribed, with campaign contributions, members of Congress and various presidents that they are so financially virtuous they should comprise an anti-democratic shadow government, a hidden oligarchy.

 

As Aristotle said in his Politics more than 2,500 years ago what “differentiates oligarchy and democracy is wealth or the lack of it. The essential point is that where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth…that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy.”

 

In a democracy political virtue is tied to sharing the wealth not to hoarding it. But today, a whole political party and the centrist, or opportunist, branch of its opposition is devoted to the absurd proposition that the rich need freedom to amass vast fortunes more than the rest of us need protection from their schemes. The Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in New Mexico thinks that regulation hurts jobs. He sees no relationship between job loss and bad business decisions sanctioned by a permissive government.

 

And all the rest of us are flailing around trying to find a safe place to hide our money from the predators who’ve been unleashed by decades of a flawed oligarchy responsible to no one but itself.

 

They must really believe that they are morally elevated by their money, when in reality they are separated from the rest of us by only the depths of their greed.

 

And when this curious view of life catches up to actuality, and the market starts to crumble, and banks teeter on the brink disaster, the virtuous rich counsel us that our fears are all psychological problems, that our decaying economy is a “mental recession,” not a real one, that the poor are shaking in their boots when they should be hailing the rich as their trusted saviors, no matter how badly they’ve screwed up.

 

This narcissistic self-esteem of the merely wealthy finds solace in fulminating against “class warfare.” Anyone struggling to get along who challenges their power – and they have all of it, along with almost all the money - is portrayed as an unpatriotic enemy, be it labor organizers working for wage earners, unions looking for better working conditions or a farm lobby asking consumers to boycott produce gotten from slave labor.

 

But those who blame psychology for the recent decline of our economy might be right, if you look at trust as an issue of psychological perspective.

 

How can this economy and the people who run it be trusted if their behavior betrays the belief that they are above human nature and its foibles, and can do no wrong and therefore need no laws to restrain their greed and keep them on the straight and narrow?

 

Bunkum like that wrecks banks and all the businesses that depend on them. We need to remember it is the very nature of the greedy never to be satisfied, never to have enough. And what they can’t take legally, they’ll take anyway they can.