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mk  ·  2495 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ETrade's new campaign is everything that's wrong with capitalism

The "Don't Get Mad" part is interesting. In some sense, it is an admission of guilt. ETrade knows firsthand that the last decade of easy money has brought little recovery, but great wealth. "Don't Get Mad" sounds like an expression of concern that the plebeian's might start agreeing about what their problem is.

As an aside, I don't get any sense that money correlates with quality of character. I've long thought it to be the case. However, recent experience has given me the sense that politic-free-ideology is a bit more prevalent in conversation among the wealthy as it is among the middle class. That is, salaried people tend to use politics to express their ideology, whereas wealthy folk tend to turn it around, putting ideology first, which then informs their politics. Most often, the ideology is noble enough, but it is necessarily less bounded by pragmatism. In fact, in that manner, IMO wage earners have something in common with the wealthy; they tend to put ideology ahead of politics (or at least give the two fairly equal footing). This actually might be a deep part of the success of the Conservative Strategy in the US.

This thought has been on my mind long enough that I have been fashioning a pithy way to describe it: The rich and the poor are susceptible to ideology because the poor cannot afford a worldly education, and the rich can afford to avoid one.