Essay about American Citizen

Submitted By ellomate123
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Pages: 11
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As an American citizen, someone who lives in the United States of America is very lucky to have all of the rights and freedom that they do. People are free to make choices regarding where to send their child to school, where to eat, what to wear, where to live, and other endless possibilities. Our government allows us to vote for who we want to lead our country in the presidential office and vote for various laws and regulations that they propose. The ability to vote for our leaders and laws is an extraordinary privilege that we have as Americans that many other countries still do not have. Although the government is in place to keep us safe and give us a country worth living in, sometimes it goes too far in extending its control. The United States government declares certain acts as “victimless crimes”, actions that have been ruled illegal but do not directly violate or threaten the rights of any other individual. That means that people are being arrested for doing things that do not have any affect on anybody except for themselves, which is preposterous. In turn, this costs society far too much money and overpopulates the prison system with offenders who do not even need to be institutionalized while not focusing on actual dangerous criminals. The victimless criminals are prosecuted and many times turned into career criminals after being labeled as a criminal by the justice system. Victimless crimes have negative implications and are just a made up product of the government and Karl Marx, Rosseau, Adam Smith, Tocqueville and Nietzsche would agree and validate this while Hobbes’ incorrect views on the state of human nature would do so even further. As Americans, our understanding of society comes from our class position. Karl Marx was the first person to say that your beliefs about social life are related to the economy. There are many levels of social class in America today. Ranging from working, to middle, to upper-middle, to upper class, would mean an endless number of ways to understand society. In this sense it is pretty clear that all of the laws that are written by the government will not apply to every social class. Some of the classes have a different understanding about what is morally right from the upper class (the class deciding all the laws). For instance, a working or lower class single mother may not be able to afford everything she needs for her family because her job pays her less than minimum wage so she resorts to prostitution to make some extra cash. As a prostitute, she is not harming anybody or anything, and if she believes that is morally okay, then nobody should arrest her and turn her into a criminal. Marx says that your beliefs about right and wrong come from where you are in society. If our government were to follow Marx’s idea, then there would be no such thing as victimless crimes. Most of the things that are deemed victimless crimes are a lower class phenomenon. When lower class people get in trouble for doing the things that the upper class sees as immoral, they are just being exploited. Humans have an unlimited degree of potential, at least according to Karl Marx. We have so much potential because we are conscious beings, therefore able to make plans. Marx believed that society should be based off of human potential and that capitalism denied people the chance to reach their potential because everyone was far too caught up in money. He believed that people were unable to reach their potential earlier in history because it was much harder to survive and that once we were able to develop technology we would move away from capitalism and follow communism, thus allowing people to reach their potential. This did not happen, however, it demonstrates good evidence about Marx’s view of people in general. He did not think that people were bad and needed a government to tell them they can or cannot do things. Marx saw great potential in humans and it was evident that people did not have any trouble
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