> That being said, our court system was never particularly kind to the poor and destitute (what institution has been?).
I encourage you to imagine a world without the rule of law.
I encourage you to imagine a world without the rule of law.
Let’s not ignore all the ways the court system has succeeded, oftentimes in numerous tiny ways (i.e. cases at the state level that set important precedent and have pretty fair outcomes for the involved parties. C.f. restrictive covenants on deeds. The rulings for my state (Michigan), at least, seem pretty well-reasoned and legally logical.)
That is, they're reading it as "since no institution has totally succeeded, I encourage you to imagine a better approach" rather than "while no institution has totally succeeded, I encourage you to imagine how much worse it could be".
When you issue loans at xxx% interest, non payment for a lot of borrowers is baked in. Plus, collection should not free (taxpayers money)
If I loan you $10 and you don't repay it, it's never going to be worthwhile for engage the legal system to reclaim that money. If there's no realistic threat of coming after somebody for $10, then no $10 loans will be offered. I think it's nice to have an environment where legal remedies are accessible to everyone for little to no marginal cost. It promotes pro-social behavior if everyone knows that everyone knows that contracts are always enforced regardless of the economic standing of the participants.
The point is that the courts and police, although vilified in this day and age, actually by their very nature do help the poor and destitute. Just maybe not as well as they could, ideally.
It's discriminatory purely as a function of money. The more money you have, the "more equal" you are and the more rights you can exert. It also means the less subject you are to criminal laws, as you can mount a powerful defense as opposed to someone who makes 20k/yr in the slums who is statistically likely to be black or hispanic.
But our society has spoken, that it's ok for poor people to get sent away and their lives destroyed as a primary function of money.
I think much of this bias emerges for two reasons. First, the news we hear is usually bad news. One can only hear so much bad news before developing negative bias. In a large nation like the USA with so many people, abuses of power are almost guaranteed to happen once in a while. It's critical that a free press report on these incidents to keep institutions honest, but an unfortunate side effect of this is negative bias against those same institutions that so often work well and protect us.
The second reason is that institutions do have power over us, and look large in our lives. In comparison to them, we are very small. This can be disconcerting and uncomfortable for some.