There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress. — Mark Twain

There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.

Author: Mark Twain

Insight: This line gets repeated so often it's almost become a joke, but there's something genuinely unsettling underneath it. Twain was pointing at a reality we still wrestle with: the people who make the rules seem to operate under a completely different set of rules. They get wealthy through access and connections that ordinary people can't touch. They vote themselves raises and benefits. They leave office and walk straight into lobbying firms. It's not that they're breaking the written law—it's that they've essentially written themselves exemptions. What makes this observation sting is how little has changed. We watch Congress members trade stocks on insider information, watch them get wealthy in ways that would land most of us in prison, and somehow it all feels legal because they designed the system that way. It's not about criminality in the traditional sense; it's about a different kind of corruption—the kind baked into the architecture itself. The real insight isn't that politicians are uniquely evil. It's that power without real accountability creates its own logic. When the people making rules face almost no consequences for bending them, something shifts in how they see both the law and their obligations. We all know people who act differently when they think nobody's watching. Congress is just that dynamic scaled up and legalized.

Source: Following the Equator, vol. 1, chapter 8