“Let them eat cake!” was what Marie Antoinette supposedly said when told the peasants couldn’t afford bread. While that is now thought to be a lie, her actions are often thought to embody the sentiment of the aristocratic class and she was merely the easy to target, foreign queen scapegoat.
McDonalds employees swearing their oath to the multi-national conglomerate, from employee handbook.
Today we have our aristocratic class saying basically the same thing to people crying out for jobs. Unemployment running out, jobs are nowhere to be found, our people cannot afford to keep roofs over their heads. Their response: ‘Get a job at McDonalds you lazy bum!’.
As the article points out, this is doubly insulting as McDonalds received more than a million applications for 50,000 jobs in a single day. That means that for every job as a hamburger flipper, 20 people are there directly competing with you.
Is this really what the rich 1% have come to? Are they really so out of touch with reality that tell themselves these lies about how society works? Could they really be so delusional that they are believe they are successful simply because they are so awesome?
How could these people not have experienced failure or known failures. This is a lesson that historically is everywhere among the wealthy classes. Yet today, the rich are so insulated from failure that they have become arrogant in a way that makes the aristocratic classes of Rome and Monarchical Europe seem tame in comparison.
The Roman General and patrician aristocrat Marcus Licinius Crassus was reportedly so rich, he is often thought to be the richest man in history. While that is debatable, Crassus was a guy from an extraordinary rich family who had his money taken away, stolen by another aristocrat in a political purge, only to get it back, doing the exact same thing to others. He was a ruthless capitalist in the sense that profited from opportunity and misery. When he noticed the city of Rome had no fire department and a horrible fire problem, he created a department made of slaves to show up to your apartment building and put out the fire, that is, only after he negotiated the purchase of the building at rock bottom prices. He ended up owning large portions of Rome and became even richer. Yet his pursuit of wealth was unrewarding, he wanted the love of the people too. In Rome that meant military victories. Unfortunately for Crassus, that resulted in his capture by the Parthians, a humiliating loss of the religious standards and a subsequent death that was rumored to end by the Parthian King’s orders to poor molten gold down his throat.
Today’s rich people don’t ever have to do any heavy lifting. Take the Koch Brothers for instance. In particular David H. Koch. He made his money the old-fashioned way, he inherited it. Work is always optional for them. Perhaps that’s why they talk so much about their hard work. It’s not the same thing when you have to survive of your own achievements.