No only for the select few, the rest of us are serfs. At this point I wouldn't be surprised if one of the billionaires started calling themselves Ramesses XXVI or something.
It's the "avocado toast" people all over again. "Why are you enjoying anything in your life right now when you could be waiting to enjoy things in the last 10-20 years of your life (if you live that long)?"
We only missed starting with no slavery by a single vote. I'm not even joking. Georgia and Carolina caused the biggest and most drawn out argument of The Continental Congress, and only managed to win by a single vote. The other 11 colonies were in favor of outlawing slavery from the start, though their stance on the natives was still crap.
Sure but you see this in those same buildings modern day?
They need x people from their party to vote against y policy to stop it, and all of them want y to fail, so they make sure the bad thing banning y that all of them want to wring their hands over passes by exactly x votes, with a sacrificial asshole who can take the PR hit or is too old to care (let's call him Joe man).
So nobody has to deal with y, everybody other than joe-man gets to say how much they wanted y, and everybody gets to deflect criticism of themselves at joe-man.
Not a new phenomena in the parliamentary politics every onebof these blatantly conspiratorial aristocratic scumfucks would have been familiar with.
Ahh, I see. Unfortunately the people that made the institutions made the mistake of believing that dishonest actors would be ferreted out by the system they were creating. That has proven to not hold up. The last time that I can think of that a SCOTUS judge resigned due to ethical questions was in the '60s or early '70s.
and so, spent money to travel and presumably stay someplace and eat food which actually might be a net gain to the economy given (we assume) the days off work were PTO time that would have been taken anyway?
I 100% agree with the post and the comments. But we stayed at my MIL's house and ate mostly BBQ from her deep freezer meat supply. I took PTO, my husband did not. The only real gain was Quality of Life, which I have absolutely no guilt about.