Nouveaux riches

"(...) the democratization of law and law enforcement — the substitution of the people for the king — made matters only worse, however.

The price of justice and peace has risen astronomically, and all the while the quality of law has steadily deteriorated to the point where the idea of law as a body of universal and immutable principles of justice has almost disappeared from public opinion and has been replaced by the idea of law as legislation (government-made law).

At the same time, democracy has succeeded where monarchy only made a modest beginning: in the ultimate destruction of the natural elites. The fortunes of great families have dissipated, and their tradition of a culture of economic independence, intellectual farsightedness, and moral and spiritual leadership has been lost and forgotten.

Rich men still exist today, but more frequently than not they owe their fortune now directly or indirectly to the state. Hence, they are often more dependent on the state’s continued favors than people of far lesser wealth. They are typically no longer the heads of long established leading families but ‘nouveaux riches’.

Their conduct is not marked by special virtue, dignity, or taste but is a reflection of the same proletarian mass-culture of presentorientedness, opportunism, and hedonism that the rich now share with everyone else; and consequently, their opinions carry no more weight in public opinion than anyone else’s.(...)" THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MONARCHY AND DEMOCRACY, AND THE IDEA OF A NATURAL ORDER Hans-Hermann Hoppe