Not sure how or where this fits, but I have a confession to make. I've thought it through and I'm pretty sure that the more I owned, the more my attitude would change toward all this stuff.

Right now, I don't own much, and I'm pretty much an "eat the rich" kind of guy who blames most of our modern ailments on the corporate state.

But what if I had lots more? What if I owned business and had people counting on me for their livelihoods? I think having a lot would rewire my brain a bit. As Ms. Wildfire points out in her article about the death of the American Dream, studies have shown how empathy decreases as wealth increases.

This doesn't seem like evidence of "free will," but a physiological phenomenon. Does it extend from our hunter-gatherer days as some kind of mechanism to hoard resources when we can? Or is it the opposite, a kind of perversion of what used to be a more share-and-share-alike mentality? Some hunter-gatherer tribes that still exist today consider resource-hoarding a kind of spiritual disorder. What can we do about it?