When they tell us that with the fruits of our labor, we cannot buy the products we want, whether it is medical procedures or butter, salt, light bulbs or flush toilets, we see that they intend to own our lives.
When we cannot save our after tax income in order to have a decent retirement and pass something on to our children without 55 percent of that going to fund the desires of politicians to buy votes from those who have nothing else to offer, we learn that they want to control our posterity and destroy the transmission of prosperity by parents. Only government, the parent of us all, can have that role.
When actual, indisputable rights are ignored, and new ones desired by the political class created, it seems to me they think they are saying that anything they desire is legal, and anything they disdain is forbidden, actual laws be damned.
We are not as far from Mr. Khodorkovsky's fate as many people think we are. Whether Khodorkovsky is a sympathetic character or a thug I don't know; but I know he is imprisoned in a system that doesn't depend on law to determine his fate. His fate is under the control of one man.
In Russia, there is not a lot of public sympathy for the oligarchy who looted the country’s wealth while the living standards of most Russians declined. And its taken Russia a long time to climb out of the dark years years of Yeltsin, when no hope seemed to be in sight. The only thing Russians associate with democracy is impoverishment, instability, powerlessness and decline. For the vast majority of them, a good life is more important than freedom. The fate of Khodorovsky is not really burning news in Russia today.