Reply #35: True that.

[rrneck]

Every society has a system of carrots and sticks to facilitate working and playing well with others. If you just can't manage it with carrots, then you have to use a stick.

In too small a nutshell, we've spent the last few decades pushing risk down the economic ladder, and the lower you go the more sticks there are. Conversely, the higher you go, the more carrots get used. So Goldman Saks has figured out how to make the system all carrots no matter what they do, while someone at the bottom lives in a world of sticks.

We have created an Ayn Randian free market dystopia where the only way to get ahead is to take what you need and do it while climbing over somebody else's shoulders. If you combine crass consumerism with an ignorance of delayed gratification because of financial insecurity and add to that the arrogance bourne of a poor education you get people shot over a purse or a pair of tennis shoes. You also get shot up schools, shot up workplaces and suicides because people just don't have the intellectual, emotional, and social resources to cope with the system we have created. And the tradgedy is that rather than amednd the system, we have figured out a way to make money off the failures by privitizing that prison system. I wonder how much of our economy is devoted to profit from human misery.

There will always be sociopaths and psychopaths among us that will just have to be locked up. But most of the people who are doing time right now didn't have to wind up in jail if we had just shown them a few carrots when they were kids.