“Intellectuals are anti-Social, rich people suffer from anger”

In 1954 Mont Pèlerin Society, liberal club founded by Friedrich A. von Hayek dedicated the anticapitalist prejudice of historians and other intellectuals to a round table in which important students of the era participated. Bertrand De Jouvenel suggested there is an intellectual enmity with businessman stemming from the fact that the first links his fate with the belief that the client is always right and, as a result, should be satisfied. The second perceives itself as a man over the masses: its task is to have the right, no matter what consumers think. Basically, he cries a world in which he was honored as a host of a privileged view of the world. The report was mutually profitable, and in some cases it was up to the intellectual who moved the king's hand - the model of Cardinal Richelieu.

With the advancement of open society all this has come to shrink. Whoever wins the market bet brings about legitimacy from the kindness of his products, not from his advisor's rhetorical ability. In more brutal terms, the powerful one needs the intellectual: the rich man, no. For Joseph Schumpeter, the chair against “money as the devil's dung” has become a ruthless struggle with the birth of a kind of intellectual sub-proligaria, made up of individuals “psicologically unsuitable to manual labor, simultaneously without necessarily having the requirements for performing a professional work”. Such a unstable state produces dissatisfaction and “discontent leads to resentment” that “is balanced into social criticism”. But what about those intellectuals, who, though successful, do not step back?

Ludwaig Von Mises thinks contempt for accumulate wealth can be understood by the envy they prove against him who, according to their judgment, is deemed unfair by fate. Zilia, which St. Agostin judged as “the sin diabolic par excellance”, is socially destructive because the greenest grass is in the backyard, not in the gardens of Versailles. Thus, the envious man spends the wall at night to uproot the flowers of his neighbor. And the intellectual, as Lew Rockwell said, president of the Ludwig Von Mises of Auburn (Alabama) has said, cannot tolerate “that capitalism enabled him who was an ass to become a billionaire, while he works as mad to ensure a modest salary increase”.

The quality of the wealth of others explains much but not everything from the popular anticapitistic mentality. Helmut Schoek refines the argument by showing how the primitive “ide that there should be a case link” under which the other person's “begaria should be in my dissanction” turned down in a primitive “a primitive, pre-religious, irrational”: any individual, envious of whom he has more than he has, so much to save the envy of others. So intellectuals tend to avoid the envy of others by adopting totalitarianism in any form - a theory that, among other things, is compatible to whom, although being less intelligent in their eyes, without having more out of life. In an equal society, the Guardian of wisdom is more equal than others.

For Ralph Raico, professor of European History near New York State University, the intellectual is essentially “a Mandarin used to live thanks to a secure source of income, usually taxes. Therefore, it will rarely find it possible to understand or assess the way capitalists, niznesmen, spooks, and tradesmen live. Intellectuals think of themselves as the cream of society, but looking around see that many businessmen, actors, comedyists earn more than they do. The only consistent response to the premiere is that the market is essentially uneven, since it generates an unfair distribution of assets. However, intellectuals, who claim to know the essence of the world, thus play a deeply antisocial role.

Wealth, to its most wildest luxury, plays a triple function. For one thing, it gives value to creativity: in the absence of a price, the search for solutions would be unstimulous. In the second place, the rich are big consumers, so their surplus creates job opportunities. More recently and more importantly, luxury causes a righteous strain of imitation: who has remained, wants the next day to ensure that today is exclusive to the few members of the jets. Intellectuals can play a fundamental role in society, but if they cause the worst envy, they risk great harm. In essence, restraining envy is not that difficult: it is enough to self - help the slogan that created Bill Clinton's fate.