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Comment by ifdefdebug | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes it feels like Kafka's The Trial is where the US court system takes most of it's inspiration from...

In think that in most countries, a large company will always win big trials.

Andrew "bunnie" Huang has written a very good 2-page note on this in: http://bunniefoo.com/nostarch/HackingTheXbox_Free.pdf (first two pages, but the whole book is a good read)

In the US it seems especially bad, since Americans seem exceptionally obsessed with "living the American dream" aka making a lot of money. Many people assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be a good person.

"Many people assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be a good person."

That sounds like one of those things that people assume everybody else must think, but nobody actually thinks.

Of course no one literally thinks this, but I observe that many Americans have a tendency to like rich people, and give them the benefit of the doubt.

In a presidential election, for example.

Everyone has a tendency to flatter wealthy people because the truth is that they're hoping, consciously or subconsciously, they'll get a dispensation from them somewhere down the line: a sale, a gift, or some other kind of benefit from association with a powerful individual. Unfortunately, it appears that many wealthy people forget this and begin to believe that they actually are just brilliant and special and that must be why they get a lot of attention.

This is in no way exclusive to Americans. In fact, from my admittedly limited experience, this is much more explicit in other cultures.

Politics is a totally different ball game. You basically must be wealthy to be successful in national politics (not necessarily in the Trump or Clinton stratospheres, but still need significant personal wealth and resources), and this is also the case in not-America as far as I can tell.

> You basically must be wealthy to be successful in national politics [..] and this is also the case in not-America as far as I can tell.

I'd say not a requirement in the Nordics. I'm sure it won't hurt though.

I'm not familiar with the politics in that area, but I would say this holds true even if the state has provided accommodation for anyone to run a competitive campaign regardless of the private resources they have available.

The talking point of "Would you rather trust someone who can't get promoted past a mid-level position in his company to play with the big boys, or someone who has managed his life such that he is in charge of things and has been able to accumulate vast personal resources?" is always going to be persuasive, IMO. "If he can't manage his own affairs..." and all that.

It's not an absolute non-starter, but I'm skeptical that any "regular Joe" would be elected for a significant national position as long as there are people who are massively more wealthy willing to compete (and there will be).

I don't know why you got downvoted, but your assumption isn't really true. In the Nordics many of the Members of Parliament have a working-class background, such as a nurse or a sawyer, with little personal wealth.

I don't have any data to back this up, but I have a feeling people tend to vote the same class as they are, with a hope that a similar candidate is better suited to understand their concerns. A working-class member would be very, very wary of voting anyone with wealth.

This is of course made possible with a true multi-party system. A businessman is a rare sight indeed within the ranks of (true) left-wing party.

That's not been my observation. People assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be good at something, not that you are inherently good.

It seems a lot of folks on HN think that if you have a lot of money, you either made it in a startup, and are thus brilliant, or you made it in any other fashion, and are probably a crook.

I don't think those are mutually exclusive options, myself. I would classify a lot of startup founders as crooks.

> Many people assume that if you have a lot of money, you must be a good person.

I used to agree with that, but now politics has cleaved this into two.

A) If you're a democrat/progressive (Soros, Hillary, et al.) you're corrupt, greedy, immoral. And you got all that money via ill means. They must be stupid and anti-American be

B) If you're a republican (Trump, Murdoch, Ted Stevens, et al.) your earned it from picking up yourself by your bootstraps, the American Dream. And they must be smart people, they have lots of money!

And vice-versa.

As an aside, I'm increasingly seeing spammy "Soros is an anti-american progressive socialist communist" comments on other low quality forums. Which is interesting considering his investments, wealth, views on Russian, path to citizenship, and interest in helping economies move away from communism into capitalism. Post-truth, I guess.

I can't help being somewhat cynical and jaded on this one. I tend to think that people become wealthy through

  (1) inheritance, 
  (2) something nefarious (greed, cheating, etc.)
  (3) working hard and the equivalent of winning the lottery, being rewarded for that hard work

I believe that I could maybe relate to the people in category 3.

except that statistically you will never meet #3 but will meet tons of #2 and #1.

Every startup/dot.com millionaire/billionaire is a #3. For every one of them there are 10,000 others who are just as smart and worked just as hard but their company just didn't pan out for any number of reasons.

OK I'll bite - how did the Clintons make their money? What goods did they sell? What services did they provide? Because they went from broke to $250M surprisingly quickly for career civil servants.

I don't think there's anyone who doesn't know that Trump inherited his wealth.

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