Unearned wealth

"... the real conservative movement was funded instead by wealthy extremists on the fringes of the business world. It was the creation of people like Richard Mellon Scaife, who inherited part of the vast Mellon fortune from his alcoholic mother. Joseph Coors inherited a brewing company, John M. Olin ran a relatively obscure chemical company, R. Randolph Richardson inherited the money his father made by selling Vick's to Proctor and Gamble. None of them can exactly be called Titans of Industry, or even titans of industry. Yet these are the men who bankrolled not just the conservative legal movement, but the conservative movement in general." Aaron Swartz on Crooked Timber website 'Political Entrepreneurs and Lunatics with Money' May 1, 2009. 

The engine of the conservative movement was unearned wealth. 

The problem of the resource curse is that it is just at the moment when a growing economy begins to plateau that the energetic generation dies off and the decision-making passes off to the wrong elements in society, to the (likely emotionally damaged) children of those who did the industrial growing. 

Furthermore, not just the offspring of the industrial pioneers will have become weak-willed and ill-prepared for proper leadership, the entire body politic would also have moved into a more comfortable, more self-satisfied cast of mind and style of life. 

Abundance is a challenge for any society, even the most seemingly energetic. A proper political-economy needs a way to pass along the economic decision-making in a more reasonable fashion while it prepares the population for the rigors of too little rigor.