As a corollary to this, Dennis Prager once posed the question why intellectuals are liberals, Marxists, anti-democratic and despise Western Civilization and the hoi polloi in general.
His answer is that they have a deep resentment toward the modern world because they feel it insufficiently rewards them since they perceive themselves as being superior.
And I'm sure others said it before Von Mises.
That was the conclusion of Eric Hoffer in his seminal work “The Ordeal of Change”. Though he traced that resentment (particularly the resentment of the “thinkers” towards the “doers” that get the rewards in practice) all the way back to the ancient and pre-Biblical civilizations.
Prager may not know it but that idea first appeared in Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”, which is a lot better than its title sounds.
“Schumpeter believed that capitalism would ultimately be destroyed by its success. He hypothesized that the economic system would eventually create a large intellectual class that survived by attacking the system of private property and freedom that was necessary for sustaining its own existence.”