People all over the world are shouting, 'End the war.'
And the band played on."
Ball of Confusion (That's What the World is Today), Norman Whitfield
The Temptations, 1970
To quote the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chivalry or republicanism; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarcely capable of cure" ("A Vindication of Natural Diet", a Note in Queen Mab; 1813).
The two-tiered system of justice in this country on which I have written before (see my 1 February 2011 OpEdNews article, "Crime and Punishment," for more on this subject), is in its way a form of anarchy and lawlessness. When you have different rules for different groups within society, whether those groups are differentiated by economic class, religious affiliation, racial or ethnic origin, sexual preference, or some combination of those differences, you are undermining respect for the law, and the nation and government that law theoretically represents. Respect is earned, it is not a given, as anyone who has ever been in a military or para-military organization (police, fire fighters, etc.) will tell. There is nothing worse for morale than having a superior to whom you are supposed to show respect, who is a complete and incompetent ass. In a military organization, in combat, these individuals are the ones who get "fragged:" taken out by his own men in what is essentially self-defense. Out of combat, these are the ones who the sergeants make sure never get promoted, by little screw-ups that the sergeants arrange. It is an extra-legal balancing of the books, a form of very controlled anarchy within a very limited group of individuals.
There is unfortunately no equivalent subversive method to take care of a similar problem in everyday society. And, as Shelley points out above, it is the inevitable byproduct of an aristocracy of wealth (or I would add any aristocracy). And has no cure other than the elimination of the aristocracy, its power, or both.
Currently it is this aristocracy of wealth that is using subversive methods to undermine respect for the law. The active avoidance of taxes by hiding money offshore, eliminating laws that prevent their taking advantage of the less well-off Americans, and justifying it through the writings of Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, and others with a so-called philosophy of "enlightened self-interest," which is nothing but a self-serving, self-deceptive scam. But then, the rich have always sought a way to justify being selfish.
Thomas Jefferson destroyed all of their arguments 200 years ago, in a letter to Thomas Law:
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