The defeat of Romney and the victory of Obama in a disastrous economy which should have crushed the incumbent shows that most people still associate themselves with "Main Street" and view "Wall Street" as the enemy. Only an ideological movement to shift this perception can save the GOP — and such a shift could also help to empower the Libertarian Party.
So let me debunk the myth right now. A look at the Forbes annual list of the richest American and international people shows that many billionaires are not "old money." Many of them are "new money": either self-made rich or the immediate heirs (wives, children, grandchildren) of the self-made rich. Also, many billionaires are women or members of non-white ethnic groups — e.g. the Mexican billionaire Carlos Helu and the women billionaires such as Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and the self-made billionaire Sara Blakely. Thus it is clear that the rich are not an "aristocracy" ruling over the poor and middle class, as leftists and Marxists assert. The rich are merely those people whose merit — hard work, intelligence, and good choices — earned them vast fortunes.
Let me also explain that trickle-down economics is not voodoo; in other words, why the rich being rich helps the poor and middle class. It helps because the rich do not spend all their money on yachts and mansions and caviar (although even their expenditures on luxury create jobs for other people). They need to make their wealth keep pace with inflation, which forces them to invest most of their money. Who do we want to make business decisions about investing in small businesses and entrepreneurs, to decide who receives society's investment capital: people who know finance and economics and take personal responsibility for their decisions, or government officials lost in a mess of bureaucracy and red tape, who experience no personal accountability from gains, losses, and the profit motive?
Capitalism is merely a system in which capital is invested by private people, as opposed to the state. "Wall Street," that much-maligned entity, is the process followed by rich people — and the financial managers who invest money for them — as they make decisions that fund the talented and hard-working middle class. Small businesses are carefully chosen by Wall Street’s investors because they have the capacity to succeed and expand, thus creating more jobs for the poor.
Wall Street is Main Street's best friend, even though most people don't see the complicated economic relationships that form the substructure of a trip to buy a loaf of bread at the local grocery store. Someone made a decision about which grocery stores to invest in, and which bakers to invest in, and the success of those decisions helps determine whether you pay $1.50 for bread, as we can today, or $15.00, as we might in the socialist nightmare of tomorrow. The socialist-leftist-modern liberal dogmas that the rich are a few crusty old white men locked away in the towers of distant mansions, counting gold coins like Scrooge, and that the corporations have enslaved us and the only practical thing is for “working people” to rebel, is totally contrary to the way the world works.
Shatter the leftist myth, and the people won't view another Republican nominee with envy, hatred, and malice, as they viewed the GOP candidate in 2012. It is too late to save the Romney campaign, but the Rand Paul 2016 campaign could benefit from the argument presented above.
