“On Wall Street he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that…Masters of the Universe. There was…no limit whatsoever. […] Moving the lever that moves the world was what he was doing.”
That was Sherman McCoy in Tom Wolfe’s brilliant 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. As an expression of the age, it is right up there with Gordon Gekko’s “greed is good” from Oliver Stone’s 1987 Wall Street.
Over time, the popular perception of bankers as soulless and depraved hasn’t changed a bit. In 2011 a protest about the wealth distribution was dubbed Occupy Wall Street. Interestingly, no protests targeted the industries that generate even greater wealth: Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and major sports stadiums. Nor were the protests in the parking lots at Wal-Mart, Target, or Home Depot. The anger about the wealth distribution was directed straight at bankers.
As we have seen over the last couple of essays in this series, the contemporary discussion about wealth distribution is not really about inequality per se. Underneath the discussion about the wealth distribution is an often unstated belief that high levels of wealth were not earned in an appropriate manner. One avenue of this discontent is the latent belief that merchant activity is immoral, violating the principle that goods should always sell for their Just Price. The belief that a good has an inherent just price has vanished, but the implications of that belief still lingers a bit.
The most vehement criticisms of wealth are translated into criticisms of the financial industry. When, and why, did the financial sector begin to arouse such ire?
Read the Rest at Public Discourse
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