Don bringing the topic back to the original subject I have always found the morality of poverty to be a fascinating subject. I have found morals to be largely a product of one’s political and economic status. For instance is it wrong for a billionaire casino mogul to swindle people collectively out of a lot of money by pulling a bait and switch? The consensus seems to be while the (mostly middle class) people swindled are mad none of them finds it bothersome enough to take 20 minutes to fill out a complaint form on the various Federal and State consumer protection agency’s websites because they don’t want to make a federal case out of it, as the courts time is needed to pursue important matters like all the kids that steal a roll of processed ground beef from the local Wal-Mart. I wonder how much ground beef one would have to steal to equal the amount of money the middle class consumers got swindled out of on the bait and switch?
Interestingly enough if you look at upper class victims of a swindle such as Bernie Madoff’s no punishment is too extreme for the swindler. Life in prison is not punishment enough your execution and the prosecution of your kids and grandkids are not too extreme in a case such as this.
If you’re a large corporation and you want to engage in immoral, criminal but profitable behavior all you have to do is ply the legislative body with enough bribes to decriminalize your activity. For example we use to have usury laws in this country. Repeal was effectively purchased by the banking industry. 30-40 years ago if an enterprise would have charged someone 30% interest it would have been labeled a criminal enterprise engaging in racketeering, the business would have been shut down and the management would have spent 20-30 years in Federal prison. Malibber finds this behavior no less offensive to his sense of morality simply because the perpetrators were able to bribe the refs. Again the victims are largely middle class so nobody complains they don’t even utter a peep.
In the end morality is an extremely flexible concept, and I opine until we enforce morality on an equal basis across all economic classes one can’t be surprised when we find people on the lower end of the economic scale lacking in morality as most on the upper end of the scale don’t have any. I guess you could say the lack of morality, and willingness to engage in criminal behavior has trickled down.
Interestingly enough if you look at upper class victims of a swindle such as Bernie Madoff’s no punishment is too extreme for the swindler. Life in prison is not punishment enough your execution and the prosecution of your kids and grandkids are not too extreme in a case such as this.
If you’re a large corporation and you want to engage in immoral, criminal but profitable behavior all you have to do is ply the legislative body with enough bribes to decriminalize your activity. For example we use to have usury laws in this country. Repeal was effectively purchased by the banking industry. 30-40 years ago if an enterprise would have charged someone 30% interest it would have been labeled a criminal enterprise engaging in racketeering, the business would have been shut down and the management would have spent 20-30 years in Federal prison. Malibber finds this behavior no less offensive to his sense of morality simply because the perpetrators were able to bribe the refs. Again the victims are largely middle class so nobody complains they don’t even utter a peep.
In the end morality is an extremely flexible concept, and I opine until we enforce morality on an equal basis across all economic classes one can’t be surprised when we find people on the lower end of the economic scale lacking in morality as most on the upper end of the scale don’t have any. I guess you could say the lack of morality, and willingness to engage in criminal behavior has trickled down.
