In 1981, then-Senator Gary Hart proposed a bill to limit the tax deduction for business meals and entertainment by 30 percent and use the added revenue to restore Reagan's cuts in the school lunch program. Hart could only find two co-sponsors in the entire Senate.

The 1980s saw Democrats, the party of the people, standing up on the floor of the House of Representatives and lauding former Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker for smothering inflation by throwing millions of Americans out of work.

In Ec 10 last year, Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein '61 told his Harvard audience, "There's some good news this month: Unemploment edged upwards..." without anyone blinking an eye.

THE EC 10 example is classic. Feldstein's point was not that he likes unemployment, but that it was neccessary to throw a few hundred thousand more economically marginal Americans into the face of poverty in order to provide for the financial security of tenured professors and the rest of the bond-holding class.

You see, Winners derive enormous moral solace from believing that their self-interest is the same as society's interest. The success in the intellectual climate of the 1980s of George Gilder's Wealth and Poverty and Charles Murray's Losing Ground, two books which argue that helping the poor hurts everyone, bear testimony to the power of this sentiment.

It is a short intellectual distance from justifying one's own position at the top of the heap to protecting that position against any challenges from the bottom. And in the 1980s, America began walking in that direction.