Admiring the rich & famous

"The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the
powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean
condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our
moral sentiments."

Adam Smith (The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759):

also...

Theodore Roosevelt ("New Nationalism" speech, 1910): "I believe in a
graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more
easily collected and far more effective-a graduated inheritance tax on big
fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion and increasing rapidly with
the size of the estate."