I have seen it personally in my spouse's godparents. I have heard it secondhand about the Uihlein family (Uline company). For the most part, it is twice-removed hearsay regarding wealthy people and families based around the Chicago-Milwaukee corridor. Some of those people are apparently real shitheels--constantly getting detained for drunk driving, but never being held accountable for it. They're super racist, too. It's likely all an intrinsic part of Chicago's endemic corruption problem. I don't live there any more, but am acquainted with a lot of people who still do, and they occasionally like to tell horror stories about their clients/customers/employers/blind-dates/random-encounters from hell. Some of it could be exaggeration or whole-cloth fabrication, but I can believe it easily.

This is because I have overheard with my own ears a serious suggestion that it would be acceptable to vanish homeless people in the darkness of night and turn them into dog food, to be sold at a premium. Some people are just evil, delude themselves into thinking they are good, and they have far more money than a just world would ever allow them to touch. Maybe you don't hear that kind of thing often in places where the rich folks are mostly hippy-dippy liberals, but hearing it from even one pair of lips, without an iota of shame, is unsettling--like seeing one cockroach in your kitchen. What is being said when I'm not around to overhear it?

I also detect signs of it in written legislation and political discourse, particularly with regard to amending welfare programs to include work requirements or blanket consent to arbitrary searches by state officials. It's as though the default assumption is that recipients are out to cheat the system for a free ride, and spend all their benefits on illegal drugs.

I can't imagine how anyone could become so rotten and yet live, but from the anecdotal evidence, they do exist, and for bizarre and unfathomable reasons, their opinions count more than mine, even when we have the same number of votes to cast.

I think of this as attitude as "Rich white trash"... The thing about being rich is that you can afford to isolate yourself for a long time, wrapped up in a community of similarly isolated people. Those attitudes grow and fester without being challenged by different opinions. That isolation creates ideologically-driven people who just don't see how hurtful thier ideas truly are.

The worst part of it is that some people who do know better and should be able to give contrasting opinions are unable to do so because they are in some way dependent on the rich bubble-dweller. They could get fired, or the person would stop paying for their rent or medical bills.

In the case of the personal anecdote, they had just finished replacing one $100k pedigreed lap dog--that had been run over--with another, when the d-bag refused to help his own nonagenarian mother with some of her bills, actually suggesting that she go on food stamps if she's having so much trouble.

Rich trash indeed.

Many of our cities are social disaster zones compared to those of other first world countries, largely because we've cut our social programs to the bone. It might just be greed rather than any puritanical morality, but I wouldn't be surprised if the lack of empathy stemmed from thinking that one's success is much more deterministic than it actually is. If people reminded themselves regularly that "there but for the grace of God go I", they'd probably agitate for better social safety nets.

Ironically, the unmitigated social problems that result from lacking basic social safety nets increase expenses many other places, including in healthcare, possibly by more than the programs would have cost. Instead of getting rehabilitation, an addict has to steal to feed their addiction, prompting more spending on police forces, plus fear and mistrust of others, and the addict uses a series of emergency room visits when things inevitably go badly.