[potato3732842]

>My personal observation is that those with the least engage in this practice the most, partly because they don't have the bandwidth to bother. It's the middle and upper-middle class who are the terminally online cynics.

Look at what the people who were living high on the hog due to tax/graft/dysfunction before losing their heads in the french revolution got up to. Look at the rabbit holes minor British nobility went down. The current american upper-ish middle class is just another cover of the same stupid bad for everyone song.

[_heimdall]

You really should give specific examples of what the French elites or British nobility did if you want to use those as examples to write off an entire category of people today based solely on their economic position.

[potato3732842]

I didn't choose the comparison point because it is nonsensical, I chose it specifically because it is relevant.

The french first and second estates convinced the government to debt spend to high heaven in the proceeding years. And much of this spending benefitted them, the .gov going to war with the english and buying warships made with timber and nails they made money off of for example. They also were exempt from the bulk of the taxation and they in turn got to levy their own taxes to a degree. So a lot of them got quite rich over that time as the normal people got hungrier and hungrier.

It's a very good parallel to how the white collar class in the US peddled all sorts of changes to policy and the economy to their relative benefit at the detriment of the industrial and skilled services economy which either got sold overseas or consolidated and financialized to the benefit of the the professional managerial types and white collar workers (and of course the CEOs and whatnot too) and to the detriment of the common man who winds up driving for uber because the factory that employed him went poof.