I have to disagree. I will not vote down your personal experience, but I do suggest that the plusses were for saying what everyone already wants to believe. Allow me to suggest several explanations of different facets of that are important.

First, it depends on whose underdog is underdoggier. You are not alone in growing up in a poor neighborhood. And when I moved here to Austin, I asked the agent to put me halfway between Tech Ridge and the University. I did not get what I expected. I heard gunshots once or twice in the 18 months before I moved. But I had no problems with my neighbors.

I did post a blog about the roots of poverty. "In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote: To seek 'causes' of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” (See here: http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/20...

Note that most of my poor Hispanic neighbors actually got up and went to work at something every day. Only that among them and of them were many who disregarded the property of others. One day, a homeless guy walked through checking car doors. He stole my sunglasses. One of the neighbors chased him off. Later, the neighbor told me that someone stole the custom grill off his car.

But I must also add that crime in the suburbs is only differently enacted. They embezzle rather than strong-arm. They decide that it is cheaper to pay off victims than to re-engineer the production line. Most of the people in The Tea Party think that social security and Medicare are appropriate government programs.

And there is the individual actor. You lived in a barrio. You are a productive Objectivist. Hillary Rodham was in Youth for Goldwater. We all make choices. Freakonomics economist Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was not busted for cooking crack with his family because at age 12 rather than being home or in school, he was at the dog track. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roland_.... He made other choices later. Freakonomics also contraposes his story with that of Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who grew up middle class and Catholic. We all make choices.

I think that it is an unfair generalization to single out the poor, as, really, like being rich, it is relative. But it makes a good narrative. As for the rich, we know that they are all a bunch of crony capitalist Democrats, right? Or are they? Hard to say...

I will grant that crime and poverty are connected: crime causes poverty.

this is insightful and astute, CB;;; I applaud you! -- j

p.s. I just tried to do a "best of" with this comment,
and I received a response "the system does not
understand your request." . I sent an e-mail.
.

Generally agree although we do not need to vote ourselves rights... we need to vote to keep the government from infringing on our rights.

Isn't that the only reason we need to abandon "the system" so-as to not ceding your rights to
Big Brother?

Never are humans unanimous.

I took a point off of your nice score for your egregious error: we do not vote ourselves rights. The nature of rights is much debated in libertarian circles. Objectivism holds that rights are requisites for living in society; those requisites derive from the metaphysical and epistemological nature of being human. They are "natural rights." Essentially, a right is something that you do not need to ask permission for.

I recommend the non-fiction works of Ayn Rand as a good foundation for understanding sociology and political science.

Not rulers. Servants. That's a key distinction.

yessir, and what became of the ideal voluntary society
which we praise here in the gulch??? -- j
.

It is very deep in our culture. I will not go into all the cultures in the world, but tribes have chiefs. How they are chosen varies somewhat, but is usually easy to understand. Chiefs have duties. Every society has these checks-and-balances. The medieval knight had to protect his peasants. In return, they gave him a share of their harvests. We pretty much follow that model even today. Ancient Rome and ancient Greek cities had a different mode. We also follow a lot of that.

Do you belong to any social clubs? How are they run? Are they run like corporations with votes sold for shares? Does one person own it and run it like a business?

awareness of societal organization principles has
subsided and students of freedom are more scarce
these days. . we are in deep trouble, I believe, because
we are no longer vigilant for our freedoms as a society. -- j
.

That is an interesting story, Randy. A book called The Secret of the League has been cited as a precursor to Atlas Shrugged. In it, the rich people derail Britain's first socialist government. At the end, in order to vote, you must buy a bond for 500 pounds. You can buy all the bonds you want; each bond equals one vote.

Corporations are run like that.

Wherever I live, I often serve as an officer in my local coin club. We model our clubs after the US government with a president, vice president, etc., and all that. We organize with a "constitution." The funny thing is that our government was modeled on a club. They did not want to mimic the European states. They took the best of Rome and Greece. But, largely, the government of the US was modeled on the intellectual societies of the English Enlightenment, with a president, a vice president, a recording secretary, a corresponding secretary, a governing committee elected by the members...

That was one reason that the crowned heads of Europe made fun of our republic. They had a totally different model of organization: the House of Habsburg, the House of York, the House of Usher...

you are right! -- j
.

while I agree, the route to making that happen
is strewn with severe anguish. -- j
.

and everyone who persists in calling our representative
republic a democracy should lose their voting privilege. -- j
.

dogs? -- j
.