Violators

That's what they call them around here, in most other places they are called poachers. I don't know how many of them are left, but I used to know people who claimed to be violators when I worked at the paper mill. I always suspected that a lot of that violator talk was just talk, kind of like the people who used to pretend to be hoodlums or hippies when they really weren't. It's a whole nother subculture, with a history that dates back to the Middle Ages in Europe. Robin Hood and his Merry Men were certainly violators, always bragging about how they were living off of the king's deer. Since we don't have kings in this country, it would seem to be outdated, but they have just replaced the king with "the man". They believe that the fish and game should belong to the people, which they do in a way but, in America, the people are supposed to be represented by the government. The streets also belong to the people, but we still need traffic cops or all those people would be constantly crashing into each other. The violators don't like traffic cops either.

The opposite of a violator is a sportsman. From the violator's point of view, a sportsman is a rich playboy who hunts and fishes because he has more time and money than he knows what to do with. It's okay that he comes up here and spends money, but he shouldn't try to tell the local yokels what to do. After all, the sportsman can afford to buy any kind of food he desires, while the poor violator needs to hunt and fish to feed his starving family. While there was some truth to this back in the days of the Great Depression, the modern poor people buy their food with government assistance, and seem to have enough money left over to frequent the casinos, which used to be the exclusive domain of the rich. Economic inequality sure ain't what it used to be.

We had an old saying among the Libertarians, or maybe it was the Birchers, I forget. "We believe the government should guarantee equality of opportunities, not equality of outcomes", or something like that. I'm not sure about the opportunity part, because rich people are always going to have more opportunities than poor people, but I'm pretty sure that equality of outcomes is not desirable, if indeed it is even possible. If the CEO made the same money as the janitor, why would anybody want to be a CEO? That said, I'm not sure how they justify those ridiculous CEO salaries. Sure, they should make more than the janitor, but millions more? If I was a CEO making even one million dollars a year, I would work for just one year and then retire for life. I have worked as a janitor, among other things, but never as a CEO. Too bad, I could have used all that extra time after my early retirement to do more hunting and fishing.