The Aristocracy of Pull ... BC...

[Selene]

That would be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton - it will never be the same again...

Paul Lexalt explained to a seventeen (17) year old young man, that every day the Senate meets, you lose a little bit of your freedom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Laxalt

More than four decades ago Ayn Rand recognized what might happen if achievement were undermined as a value when she wrote this passage:

“We are at the dawn of a new age,” said James Taggart from above the rim of his champagne glass. “We are breaking up the vicious tyranny of economic power. We will set men free of the rule of the dollar. We will release our spiritual aims from dependence on the owners of material means. We will liberate our culture from the stranglehold of the profit-chasers. We will build a society dedicated to higher ideals, and we will replace the aristocracy of money by——the aristocracy of pull,” said a voice beyond the group.8

Pull has always been a fact of American life. Examples of its more corrupt form abound, from the Grant administration to the Clinton administration, from Tweed of Tammany Hall to Edwards of Louisiana. At the same time, its practice violates other basic American values. One is that no group should be granted a special or superior status and endowed with privileges denied to the rest of society. To put it another way, individuals should be responsible for themselves and be rewarded for their own grit and determination, not because they possess certain characteristics over which they have little or no control. Some years ago the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils observed, “an orientation toward achievement is inherently ‘individualistic.’”9 It is individualism and achievement that make America unique and great. Rewarding people on the basis of their status in some officially defined and sanctioned group will, in the end, do more harm than good.

http://fee.org/freeman/detail/an-aristocracy-of-pull/