Indeed Gib, nasty, brutish and short: <In your belief that things were much better in Victorian days, there is an unspoken assumption that you would have been one of the beneficiaries of the looting. But you would more likely have been one of the vast majority of the poor with little prospect of advancement, fit for a life that was nasty, brutish, and short. The good old days were not. >
My experience of life is that I would indeed have been in that short-lived group. My life has been a constant battle to learn, work, save, invest and spend very carefully. Mine has never been one of privilege and preference.
You have it completely back to front. My ideology is fundamentally against those who grab power and use their relationships or dishonesty to loot for personal interest at public expense.
But from when I was young, there has been a paradigm shift from those in power enjoying the perks handed out to their power-broker buddies, to a more evil welfare state mentality where criminals are funded by the state to torment and murder children and to live a life of bludging along with hordes of others who live on opm taken by force against their will. That includes not just welfarists, but politicians and the legions of hangers-on with their noses deep in the public trough.
The crime is the same whether it's a powerful wealthy person stealing or a "poor" person. I have no more sympathy with "poor" people stealing, murdering and criming than with the wealthy doing so.
My paternal grandfather came to NZ with his 3 siblings [as children in their early to mid teens] having been orphaned by [presumably] tuberculosis with his parents being buried in Peckham cemetery which was not a high end place. It was largely a pauper's place. My paternal grandmother arrived with just a mother and two sisters, living in abject poverty, having escaped the Prussian invasion of Cornimont in 1872 and the siege of Paris. Life was indeed nasty, brutish and short. My maternal grandparents were not quite as destitute and desperate, but life was hardly spectacular as a Norfolk Island store keeper, and as an expatriate working in the oil industry in Dalian [though that grand father worked his way up and did okay].
Not at all do I think I would have been in the looting class of Victoriana and neither would I want to be. I disagree with TJ that it's fine to live the high life at the expense of the masses and hope they don't get too stroppy too soon. A voluntary exchange of freely traded value among consenting and competent individuals is the highest ideal.
Whether the looting is done by the powerful by force, or the mob grabbing opm via a democratic vote, it's evil-doing as in the oldest and darkest part of the ethics-free chimpoid jungle.
Noblesse oblige,
Mqurice
PS: I don't know much at all about Goldman Sachs, but would be surprised if they are not bandits who have managed to be given umpty$billions of public funds for private benefit and to have conducted fraudulent or at least deceptive operations designed to relieve the gullible and ignorant of their money. |
