Money is actually moral brownie points to conservatives, and the more you have the better, and I actually mean morally superior, person you are. The people who have the most money of all, instead of being like scum on a pond that always rises to the top (my view) are instead seen as the ultimate moral paragons. The richest of all are nearly canonized for Sainthood.
People who have little money are dim, or if not dim then surely idiots who have no common sense. Worse, most poorer people are evil, with their evil increasing as they move down the income scale. Poor people are actually bad people. You see this moral scale applied everywhere in conservative ideology, even by some elitist commenters on this board. If humans suck, well, the poorer humans suck most of all.
It is not by accident that conservative humans used to throw the poor in debtor’s prisons. While Jesus said to give all your money away, his latter day followers a few centuries ago had turned it all around. Being poor was actually a criminal offense. Poorer people were like thieves, muggers, rapists and killers.
You see this ideology carrying on today when conservatives construct a welfare = theft paradigm that says almost explicitly that to be poorer in an advanced society is to be a thief. All of the poor are common thieves, no better than robbers and pickpockets. This is the mindset underlying all conservative philosophy, taken to its utmost in Libertarian “taxation is theft” mottoes.
