Scott Fitzgerald once said that the wealthy are different from us.

They knock people around without noticing the harm they have done and then retreat back into their wealth where they are protected from consequences. Someone once called their condition wealth blindness. Wealth is a mirror in front of the eyes that prevents a view of very little except one’s self.

 Wealth blindness says, “I have learned from over thirty years starting and growing businesses that sustainable jobs are opportunities that are only crated in the private sector, not by government programs.” So, what do you do? Instead of starting businesses and creating jobs, you run for the office that you say can’t create jobs. Wealth is blind both to logic and inconsistency. (One does have to wonder what the real motive is, especially, since your state already has, per capita, the most entrepreneur and start-up activity in the country.)

Wealth wants to reduce capital gains tax. That is, shift even more of the cost of governing the state from the plutocrats who get their wealth from capital gains onto the backs of wage earners. Wealth is unable to see consequences for others. Wealth never has enough; if it is going to cut taxes, it cuts the top bracket.

Wealth doesn’t have to pay much attention to the meaning of what it says. Wealth states, for instance, that when it was in business accumulating wealth, the employees had an average salary near $90,000. The statement wasn’t meant to be deceptive, but it’s hidden misinformation is more difficult to identify and more scary than outright deception is. Wealth finds no need to take care with the meanings of words. Wealth-blindness is like what Humpty Dumpty said to Alice, “When I use a word, it means what I want it to mean.”

So, what is the difference between average and median? Take an exaggerated, hypothetical example. This hypothetical, profitable enterprise has three founders who make $2 million each and 100 employees at minimum wage. For the average add up the total and divide by 103. You get a nice, hefty average of about $70 thousand, but 100 out of the 103 are still making $15,000 a year. The median is a real person in the middle of the salary scale. The average is simply a statistic, but, for the wealthy, statistics (like profits) are more important than people.

Because wealth is blind to self-knowledge, it likes to believe that it has the heart of a philanthropist, but as Mr. Dooley said of Andrew Carnegie, “Whenever he gives away a library, he gives himself away in a speech.” Wealth gives a speech about establishing college scholarships for training — but not a word for education. Wealth has never seen much use for education and has learned to be suspicious of it. Trained employees tend to be docile, but the educated ones tend to ask the difficult questions that are the lifeblood of economic growth.

Whatever imagined or real weaknesses there may be in Montana higher education have been caused by high tuition resulting from the Legislature’s obscene financial neglect of higher education. The excellent, world-envied, free, public education system created by our grandfathers and that was used to build this state has now been abandoned by the taxpayers and legislators. A determined governor, however, could pressure the Legislature to bring back public funding (and the future of the state). A few training scholarships are wealth’s slap in the face to most of Montana’s young people.

Wealth is capable of seeing one fact: that an engineering or tech graduate is offered a higher beginning salary than a letters and science graduate. Wealth is blind to the fact at age 55, the highest earning age, the letters and science grad has moved ahead of tech graduates on the income scale. The difference is caused by the narrowness of training on one hand and, on the other, the flexibility of having learned how to learn for a lifetime.

As Mr. Justice Holmes said to Franklin Roosevelt, “Mr. President, you and working people are in a war.” Roosevelt went to war, and that war of the wealthy against wage earners is still going on, and, now, the 90 percent are losing.

There is no way that wealth blindness can make any sense of St. Francis’ prayer, “…grant that I may not so much seek to be understood as to understand.”

There are a few who are still working on that old camel and needle trick.

O’Neil is a resident of Kalispell.