When Mitt Romney deliberately inverted the division of society into Makers and Takers, students of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class understood exactly where he was coming from. The heart of Veblen's theory is that work, especially productive work, is held to be the province of the inferior orders, while appropriation of the work of others is to be honored in the highest degree. This is the display of prowess—force or fraud, and nowadays especially financial shenanigans.
Second in importance only to the accumulation of wealth and power in such honored ways is the unmistakable demonstration that one has done it: Conspicuous Consumption in the most useless and wasteful ways that one can afford. The attainment of Too Big to Jail status is the pinnacle of both Conspicuous Consumption and prowess.
Tied in with the denigration of work, traditionally the province of women and slaves, is the reduction of women to property and status symbols; and the elevation to the highest honor of generally worse-than-useless occupations, principally war, those forms of religion that elevate the rich and powerful, politics (when only men of property could vote, or when the votes of others do not count), and the upper-class forms of sport such as hunting and polo. The corollary drawn by the rich is that the rich are more important, smarter, more moral, and more deserving of whatever they might desire than the less rich, and so on down to poor Whites in the South lording it over poor Blacks.
This is serious stuff. Veblen's account of it is also in places laugh-out-loud funny, the funniest work of non-satirical non-fiction I have ever encountered, because of the ridiculousness of those posturing so hard in seeking our approbation.