I saw an interview on CNN this morning, with a spokesman for Moody Analytics, a company that analyzes business trends. The man was commenting on the drop in the official unemployment rate released this morning (now at 8.3%). He mentioned that it did not appear to be a fluke, and that although the statistic was modest, it was genuine and seemed supported by other economic numbers. I have neither any reason to doubt the man, nor any inclination to see this as anything but an isolated data point of little intrinsic significance.

But that’s not what struck me as noteworthy about the interview. It was something he said in passing that gave me a troubling insight into the thought processes and world-view of the professional middleman class: those who live by manipulating, not by doing.

He ventured the opinion that the unemployment figure would probably drop even further in the near future as people “chose” to go back to work. His reasoning was that salaries were low, barely keeping up with inflation which is also low, and many job seekers were “holding back”, waiting for salaries to start rising before they jumped back into the job market. They did not want to be “trapped” at lower salaries in their new jobs.

This is a man who really believes the average unemployed person can afford to plan for when he will re-enter the work force, that he can afford to bide his time and pick a more advantageous moment and economic environment before going back to work. I suppose that sort of thinking may be commonplace on Wall Street, but having been un- or under-employed myself, and knowing many who are, including in my own family, I find this mentality astonishing.

It’s the same kind of subconscious arrogance and elitism that assumes that if unemployment compensation and other welfare benefits were done away with, lazy and greedy people would just get off their freeloading ass and go out and get a job, presumably, after first taking a bath. They simply cannot visualize the fear, uncertainty and helplessness that hard times in general, and unemployment in particular, strikes into the heart of good, decent people living from paycheck to paycheck, people who stand to lose everything, even their loved ones, due to decisions made by others over which they have no control and had no way to anticipate. They actually believe people WANT to be out of work, that social welfare and the safety net, like crime or fraud, are more lucrative than honest labor. As far as they are concerned, those who are unemployed deserve to be so because they are foolish, weaker, lazier.

How can such fortunate people have such disdain for their fellow man? Who ARE these people? How did they get that way? How did they develop such contempt and indifference for those who are not like them? They are thugs, bullies, they really believe that the weak and helpless deserve their lot, that they will never be like that themselves because they are stronger, they are better, they are superior.

The joke is on them, though; because every day the ranks of the weak and the helpless grow, the strong get much stronger, but there are way fewer of them every day. And as the thugs and bullies get weaker, as they get sick and old and hurt, they cannot imagine that it is their fault, their foolishness, their weakness, their lazyness. They, who were so quick to claim credit for their success, seem incapable of blaming themselves for their misfortune.