Hail the Conquering Heroes

How did the Kochenlocher boys get so rich? It's all kind of fuzzy. They went to a party, a sendoff for the poor slobs in the workingman's trenches, and woke up insanely wealthy and without a clear memory of how it happened. So they say. The working people may have had something to do with it, you would think, since that kind of money doesn't come out of nowhere, but those workers may get uppity and start demanding a share of the wealth so the money will be declared illegitimate.

Fatherless, and outside the realm of normal human causation, that is. Legitimate as hell on the Kochenlocher end, of course. I mean, what would you do but try to hang on to it in every way possible? And marry, ally yourself and legitimize the cash. Give it a daddy. A libertarian daddy. This is how you reverse-engineer the whole thing, you declare the creation of wealth to be the work of heroic individuals, the Norse gods of big business, excluding everyone else and social systems and infrastructure and so on.

Your think tanks put out memoranda to the effect of your greatness and how your golden touch made all that money in spite of the horrible, lazy working scum trying to hold you back and the hideous feds, memoranda replete with stats and figures and graphs and all kinds of fancy rationalization. There is no social aspect to the creation of that wealth at all, they say. It was a miracle, the miracle of J.P. Morgan's Creek, dwarfing the Loaves and Fishes incident. They are gods, ascended masters. Regard them with awe.

And leave them alone, it is recommended, for God's sake, and for your own good. Somehow, they reassure us, it all works out better that way, even for those whose jobs went away and who didn't come out of that last, libertarian-engineered economic crash intact. We must believe: they are heroes. We must trust them because we need heroes and they're plausible heroes, no matter how all the work actually got done and how many innocent people were hurt or neglected as the Kochenlochers made more and more money.