The Hidden Cost of Great Wealth

When the rich stop answering to anyone, corruption stops being the exception and becomes the system...

Power doesn’t just protect itself with laws or money. It protects itself by shaping how we think about right and wrong.

In today’s world, wealth has become the main tool of that protection. When people gain enough money to escape accountability, their sense of conscience starts to fade. They begin to believe their success means they deserve more power, and that the rules that apply to others shouldn’t apply to them. That’s how corruption grows quietly at the top, not always through crime, but through belief.

And that’s why this discussion matters. We can’t fix what we don’t see, and right now, much of the moral decay driving inequality hides behind billionaire-funded media, polished language, and public relations. Understanding how wealth reshapes the mind — and how it builds systems that defend its own privilege — is the first step toward rebuilding a society grounded in fairness, responsibility, and truth.

We have to begin with a blunt recognition: power protects itself, and in our age, wealth is power’s preferred vehicle.

The network of media, think tanks, lobbying, and political influence that protects the ultrarich is not an historical accident or merely ideological coincidence. It is an outcome of human psychology, social structure, and incentives.

The interesting—and frightening—question is how that complex infrastructure became far more developed on the side that defends low tax rates and looser regulation than on the side that, in theory, would check excessive wealth. And the roots of that asymmetry lie deep in psychology, social mobility, and the nature of inequality itself.

Let’s start with the psychological finding that undergirds much of this: a body of research shows that higher social class tends to correlate with a greater likelihood of unethical behavior. In experiments, the wealthy are more prone to cheat, lie, or act in their own interest at the expense of others, compared to those of more modest means.

One explanation is that wealth insulates people from consequences and social accountability; it also breeds entitlement or a diminished sense of others’ rights.

That psychological tendency doesn’t mean every rich person is corrupt. But it does suggest that among those who succeed in extreme wealth accumulation, there may be overrepresentation of what psychologists call the “Dark Triad” traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and subclinical psychopathy.

These are all qualities marked by manipulation, lack of empathy, self-promotion, and a disposition to break rules. Several studies show that people scoring higher on these traits are more likely to engage in bribery, corruption, and white-collar crime, often rationalizing their actions via beliefs about luck or personal or familial exceptionalism.

So, over time, as wealth concentrates, the set of people who control wealth and power is more likely to include those who are comfortable bending rules, using influence, and hiding moral risk. Once they achieve wealth, they have both means and motive to cement their position, and to manufacture the intellectual and political scaffolding around it.

That scaffolding takes the form of media outlets, think tanks, legal advocacy groups, and political funding networks.

On the other hand, the morally ambitious — but economically modest — side of the spectrum doesn’t have the same access to deep resources. When people don’t have immense surplus wealth beyond livelihood and security, they’re less able to fund extensive propaganda machines, hire legions of policy analysts, or infiltrate governance through donations and influence.

There is less bandwidth, literally and financially, to wage long fights over tax codes and regulatory capture. The morbidly rich, by contrast, can underwrite research institutes that produce “studies” and narratives favoring lower taxation, deregulation, privatization, and narratives casting regulation as stifling innovation.

But there is more: the wealthy have an interest in creating and defending a culture that sees their power as legitimate, necessary, or even persecuted. Think tanks, policy journals, media platforms, and networks of journalists can generate a discourse that portrays taxation as theft, government spending as waste, regulation as bureaucratic tyranny, and any attempts at redistributive policy as radical or un-American.

Those narratives aren’t just ideological, they’re functional: they protect the elites from moral scrutiny and political, social, or legal threat.

Because the wealthy can pay, they can seed entire intellectual ecosystems. They can underwrite legal defense teams when individual actors face litigation. They can fund political campaigns that shield favorable legislators. They can orchestrate lobbying apparatuses that flood capital into legislative corridors. Over time, this becomes self-reinforcing: the successful moneyed class gets the political and legal levers on its side; in turn, those levers allow greater accumulation of wealth, and more resources to defend.

Thus, when you look at the left — or at least the part of the left that genuinely wants to tax the wealthy or regulate big capital — those factions tend to be weaker institutionally, because their constituent base is less wealthy. Grassroots activism, nonprofit organizing, and academic critique are important, but they lack the scale and deep funding to compete over decades with well-resourced institutions.

And when some wealthy philanthropists do fund leftish think tanks or media, they often shy away from bold structural challenges to the elite, or end up coopted. The infrastructure of resistance to great wealth is always playing catch-up.

This structural inequality of influence is why, despite political upheavals, we haven’t seen sustained, meaningful tax increases on the hyper-wealthy in forty-plus years. They use their money to defend their money. They pay for the legal defense of loopholes. They underwrite the policy labs that lobby for tax shelters. They sponsor the media that frame them as job creators under siege. The result is a resilient edifice of wealth and privilege protection.

Sociologically, this is an example of what’s called “cumulative advantage.” Wealth begets power; power begets wealth; and the rules of society tilt increasingly in favor of those already in command. Over time, the minority that holds most wealth also gains control over the narrative, the institutions, and the legal guardrails, making it harder for challengers to shift the system.

From a deeper psychological and moral vantage, the alignment of psychopathic “dark traits” with high-stakes systems concentrates moral hazard in the elite. When the wealthy are more likely to act unethically, and then also have the means to insulate themselves from consequences, the system is skewed. If society’s moral enforcers are institutionally weak relative to the elite’s power, we end up with a structural blind spot.

It’s worth noting that not all wealthy people or conservative institutions are malevolent. Many are sincere, altruistic, or legitimately productive. But the disproportionate influence of a class that is enriched by loopholes and low accountability means we must examine the system’s architecture, not just its personalities.

If we’re to shift this balance, the task is twofold: build resilient institutional counterweights on the side of equity, transparency, and accountability; and adopt guardrails that reduce the insulation wealth gives against social and legal consequence.

Until then, the built infrastructure of influence on behalf of the morbidly rich will continue defending low tax rates, resisting oversight, and making it hard for upper-class wrongdoing to stick.

In short: one reason the infrastructure protecting the rich is so powerful is that it is financed by people with both motive and means to build it as well as carrying, psychologically, the very traits that help amass extreme wealth also make it plausible they will use that power to preserve and defend it.

That is not merely politics; it is the sociological logic of power in unequal societies. If we want a healthier balance, we must match their infrastructure with ours and confront the moral and structural asymmetry at its roots the way FDR did back in the 1930s.