When I hear people in banking and finance complain that they are being targeted in a "class war" by calls to tax them and regulate their industry, I remember the words of H.L. Mencken (1880–1956):
The United States is probably the only country ever heard of on earth in which stockbrokers are almost ipso facto members of good society. … In all other societies that I know of they sit below the salt, and in many countries they are thought of as inferior to ordinary business men, and the general attitude toward them is that of suspicion. They are regarded as traders of a peculiarly anti-social type, and that is precisely what they are. But in the United States they belong to the best clubs, and their wives and daughters move in very haughty circles.
[This passage presumably dates to before Mencken's 1948 stroke. It appears in his Minority Report (1956), a collection of odds and ends from his private notebooks, as the second paragraph of item #267. Minority Report was originally published at New York by Alfred A. Knopf but is now kept in print by the Johns Hopkins University Press, part of something called the Buncombe Collection.]