‘Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me,” wrote F Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. “They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” The delusions of entitlement – that the rich deserve their wealth, privilege and the right to transgress social mores as they choose – are ever-present. In their eyes, wealth can’t just be a by-product of luck, can it? It must, one way or another, be deserved.
Among the great deformations of the four neoliberal decades through which we have lived are not just the policy catastrophes – monetarism, financial deregulation, austerity, Brexit, the Truss budget – but also the way that wealth generation and entrepreneurship, so crucial to the capitalist economy, have been ideologically framed. Instead of being recognised as a profoundly social process – in which great universities, the financial ecosystem and the runway provided by large and sophisticated markets support entrepreneurship – enterprise, and the wealth it produces, has been characterised as wholly attributable to individual derring-do in which luck plays little part. Hence the obsession with shrinking the state to reduce “burdensome” tax.
