The delusions of entitlement that the rich deserve their wealth, privilege and the right to transgress social mores as they choose are ever-present. 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.
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. Individual agency is part of the story but, as Warren Buffett acknowledges, so does the ovarian lottery being born in the US where its system favours the skills he possesses.
Riches are a privilege: taxing them to contribute a fair share to society's wider health from which the rich benefit too is the obligation that comes with being privileged. But decades of being congratulated and indulged for the relentless pursuit of their own self-interest has turned the heads of too many of our successful rich.
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