| sc94597 said: Lot's of just-world hypothesis thinking in this thread. I am doing pretty well myself. Make a top 1% income for my age. Save about two-thirds of it (after taxes.) Likely can retire in five years when I am 37 years old, if I were to want to (I don't.) But I am well-aware I am a few unlucky circumstances away from being penniless. And while yes I did work hard to get where I am, it wasn't without the assistance of society and a few lucky advantages. I can guarantee you that if I were born in the family I was born into (single-parent waitress as a mother) in say the 1890's instead of the 1990's, I wouldn't have been able to move between classes (working class -> professional-managerial class.) And that is really the end society of the "equality under the law is all we need" mindset -- the Gilded Age. |
We don't even have equal treatment under the law. The rich can easily buy their way out of trouble. They can afford high powered lawyers and use their money to intimidate the legal and judicial systems into not touching them to begin with. Even when they can't, the consequences, both short-term and long-term, lay on them far more lightly than the poor. We've all heard "when the penalty for a crime is a fine, it is only a crime for the poor," and "A fine is the price you pay to make something legal." But even when the penalty for a crime is jail time, the wealthy are far more likely to avoid jail time, thanks to money and connections.
We have a lot of convicted felons in the U.S. government today, not just the Felon-in-Chief. Kennedy, for example was convicted on felony heroin possession charges in South Dakota. He had several priors for possession before his felony bust, and at least one person has said that Kennedy not only used heroin, he actually sold heroin. He never saw any jail time for it. His family has said that even before that, he ran with a gang in Hyannis Port that regularly committed theft to support their drug habits. Instead of being condemned to a life of living in crappy trailer parks in South Dakota or even being homeless, he is now fucking up the public health system with woo pushed by "wellness" influences.
