Society seems to have fallen back into the same bad habits as back in the 1960s and earlier. Grouping people into categories based on nothing but accidents of birth, cherry-picking a few bad apples out of that arbitrary group then painting the entire group as bad is exactly what American society did during the majority of the 20th and all of the 19th centuries. Attempting to justify it as moral or positive as it is done these days doesn't make it any better. People aren't members of ethnicities or genders. People are people. Just because one person did wrong doesn't mean everyone who bears nothing more than a passing resemblance to that person are also bad.
I'm, what you'd call, employed. Even if I lost this job, I wouldn't spend it sitting in a park like some homeless man waiting for "Wall Street" to give me "my dues". If your humanities degree isn't getting you anywhere, that's not the fault of traders, that's yours for having an inflated expectation of what it would get. I would go get a job, anything, while looking for something else becuase nothing looks worse for your future employment prospects than a big, blank space on your resume. "Protesting Wall Street September 2011 - Present" isn't going to be an impressive feature.
The roads comment is kinda funny considering that, parallel, we have the President complaining about all those "corporate jets". Doesn't this mean that the wealthy might actually use the roads less than the rest of us because they prefer to fly?
Probably because the Turnpike doesn't jam up like I-295 does and has onramps and offramps positioned around where people want to go. Just speculating, I've never been in New Jersey.
We ask our neighbors if they can pick up our mail or check in on the cat, we don't demand that they do and throw them in prison when they refuse. There's a huge difference between a social contract and forced servitude. We enter into no social contracts we don't agree to, which means that, yes, I can tell my neighbor I'm not in a position to look in on his cat this time.
At the end of the day, even if he can't pay it all back, I'd rather he live in poverty with a destroyed name than getting three squares and a bed at my expense.
Speaking as a victim of the WorldCom scandal, no, Bernie Madoff has no business being in prison. His imprisonment is not an appropriate punishment for his behaviors, he is not a danger to society and does not need to be isolated from the general population, nor does his imprisonment provide any justice toward those he defrauded. Like Bernard Ebbers and Scott Sullivan, I would prefer Madoff to remain in society as a productive member so he can continually reimburse those he defrauded. As it stands, Ebbers' 25 year prison sentence does no good to me, he isn't working to reimburse my lost investment. As for Sullivan, he is out of prison and I am seeing no checks coming in the mail from him to recompense as the Government overrode my interests for its own and decided that the people who were defrauded meant nothing and decided a few years confinement in one of its facilities was appropriate.
No, these people do not belong in a prison. They physically harmed no one and should be out there working to pay us back for what they stole, not costing us even more money to pay for their food, shelter, entertainment, and prison watch.
This is a purely bar room napkin calculation here (meaning based on only cursory examination of annual violent crime and murder rates combined with life expectancy), but based on violent crime rates, and that prisons should, at the most outset, be used to house only those we literally cannot trust in civil society (the life without parole or nothing at all philosophy), the prison population should be around 67,000. This is the population of rapists, thugs, and murderers in our society. Everyone else didn't produce physical harm to another nor is their crime serving the victim any justice; such as the white collar variety - a perpetrator of a Ponzi scheme has no business being in prison - his ruined reputation and asset siezure to repay those he defrauded is punishment enough.
I would wager a guess that there have yet to be 2.3 million instances of violent crime in America's history, let alone on such a scale to put that many into a prison. If there were that many violent people in our country, which is almost exactly 1% of our entire adult population, our society would be what you see in those Mad Max movies.
Anti-trade is primarily a government thing. Trade means activity and production that happens outside the zone of that government's control, meaning fewer opportunities to tax and regulate that activity. The public is played to other motives to drive away external influences.
The "more free" category hobbled along with the rest of the bottom dwellers until 1995. Does this mean that these nations moved toward the higher freedom category at that point or were they caught up in the Western market bubble? It would be interesting to determine if there's a freedom "breaking point" that needs to be hit to enjoy the benefits; or if this is a proof positive that movements toward a freer society generates the growth by giving a before-and-after snapshot.
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Contraption