As always, you've got the perfect answers to the wrong questions. And nobody cares that Romney is rich. Its just that making money for your company, no matter how laudable, is not a qualification for public office. In fact, unless you can totally separate the two mentally, it totally disqualifies you for public office. Now, listen carefully.

I'm sure Mitt wouldn't lie to the SEC and the IRS because they have the resources to catch him and the authority to fry his jive ass. But there's no doubt that lying about, say, "he couldn't have possibly shut down that steel mill because he was away on Olympic duty" would be very bad press for him, although strictly not against the law. He used that excuse on his Massachusetts campaigns and the evidence now shows he was on the Bain payroll while he was off in Utah grooming the slopes. Nothing illegal about that, just a lie. There is nothing illegal about stashing your excess dough in foreign banks either (as long as you report it to the Fed). But you will note how evasive he has been about allowing anyone to have access to any IRS evidence of that (those infamous tax returns he won't show us).

The IRS has all this information, but it can't release it without Romney's permission. Mitt is smart, he won't lie to the taxman because he knows he can go to jail. But he's perfectly willing to lie to the rest of the world. It's not even hypocritical on his part, in the Mittster's moral universe, lying about his financial dealings (as long as it isn't illegal) is perfectly ethical. In fact, to the Conservative businessman, the inalienable right to lie about or obscure your financial dealings is the very definition of "freedom".

The Constitution contains no explicit guarantee of a "right to privacy" , a concept that would have been alien in the 18th century, where only the tiny minority who owned their own property lived in their own houses. The Bill of Rights, however, does allude to types of privacy, such as belief (1st Amendment), against the domestic billeting of troops, (3rd Amendment), and the 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination, which has been interpreted widely and liberally and has deep roots in British Common Law.

The 4th Amendment, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures," is of course, the biggie. It keeps the taxman from gathering info on what you've got stashed away, exactly what the bourgeois merchants and planters of the 13 colonies were really concerned about: bullion and documentary evidence of property, and the ability of the Crown to tax it.

Interpretations of the Constitution that reflect more modern sensibilities have been primarily from liberals. Recall how Judge Bork in his confirmation hearings actually argued that no general right of privacy existed.

"Gentlemen of property" don't need to have the government protect their privacy, they have guards and walls and lawyers for that. What they really care about is that no one know where they stash their loot, and how much they've got. They call that "liberty".