I also don't think that the outcome would necessarily be the same if the 20-year-old cashier and a 20-year-old Romney were to somehow change places. In life, we constantly face choices, and while unchosen circumstances play some role in who we are (I will never be a professional basketball player or a ballerina), we are not predetermined. Ahead of each of us, at every moment, is a forking path. The future does not exist yet.
Seriously, what is this world coming to... When did people stop working so hard, but rather coveting their neighbors house?
Unfortunately that's increasingly no longer the case.
When did people not covet their neighbors house? This sounds like canned tea party rhetoric.
The facts will certainly support a widening gap between the wealthy and poor in our (US) society. Will they also support this alleged paradigm shift in working class mentality?
Looking at the man's resume, combined with the fact that he has run multiple political campaigns - including one for POTUS, which is no cake-walk - tells me the guy is a pretty hard worker.
I'm not going to comment on the "fairness" of the relative wages, but implying that a McDonald's employee and Mitt Romney are equally productive, or work equally hard, is nonsense regardless of your political stance.
Their minimum-wage employees are expected to do physical and mental labor for 302 hours a month (75.5 hrs/wk) to earn a grand total of $2,060, while people such as Mitt Romney literally don't have to do any labor to earn $1,075,000 in carried interest (and only carried interest, that doesn't include capital gains or anything else) during the same month [1].
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2012/01/24/news/economy/Romney_tax_retu...