Max Keiser has made a simple but absolutely brilliant observation about crony capitalism.
There is a certain prevailing attitude being broadly promoted that if a person can pay for something, then they should have it, and if they cannot pay for it, then they can't have it.
This is a fundamentally valid idea for ordering the discretionary aspects of an economy. Like most principles it is based on a number of assumptions including opportunity, honesty, and fairness of remuneration.
Having spent the better part of my working life traveling the world, flying hundreds of thousands of miles in a year at times. I became used to different classes of travel, and special clubs for frequent and professional travelers. I have no problem with that, even now that I don't travel in that manner much anymore.
But such differentiation has its limits. Evil is not only the absence but often the misapplication of virtue, an excess of zeal and a lack of proportion.
One can easily see how this principle of wealth as differentiation and rationing is now being applied to healthcare. By arguing with extreme examples of 'luxury treatments,' and widening the definition of what is discretionary, in fact basic healthcare can be cut back and even denied to those who cannot afford it, or afford it only with great difficulty, so that even questions of life and death can become a matter of the ability to pay.
What if this principle of the primacy of wealth is applied to the law? To justice? To go about one's business without official harassment?
It has gotten so bad that we have recently seen an instance showing that if you can afford the best lawyers available, you can steal the money of your clients, and you can openly keep that money, and get away with it.
The very principle that made America different, that made America a great beacon of light in history, is the the idea that 'all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.'
America was intended to be a classless society, in which peoples' fundamental value as human beings was to be judged not by gender, or faith, or color of skin, or even their relative ability to spend money on luxury items, but by their fundamental worthiness and rights as citizens, sufficient in itself, because that value was given not by the State, but inalienably by God.
Yes those rights are limited, but they are also sacred and inviolate. And that does not mean that you have the right to equal protection under the law, to be considered fully a human being, but only if you can pay for it.
This will spread to all aspects of civil interaction as we become a nation of princelings and paupers via financial segregation.
Posted on March 17, 2012 by maxkeiser
■ Pay the TSA $100 and Bypass Airport Security
As the TSA spreads to trains and highways imagine a ‘bypass’ card applied in these instances as well. Pay a fee and drive in separate lanes, sit in separate train carriages, park in reserved parking, even walk on segregated sidewalks.
Financial Jim Crow laws are no longer a theory, they’re here.
