Originally Posted by '58 Flat

But isn't background checks inherently saying that someone is guilty of something until proven innocent - an alien, tyrannical concept?

Employers routinely do background checks for criminal records and credit histories. This is especially so as fewer people make things and more people manage assets easily converted to personal use, command objects that if handled incompetently or maliciously can lead to a costly lawsuit, or have activities involving some intimacy with their personal charges. People with fecal credit ratings are much more likely to embezzle cash or steal merchandise to meet their exaggerated needs or 'solve' their improvidence. Habitual drug or alcohol offenders can make any delivery of merchandise into a tragedy that pits a company against some ambulance-chasing attorney who tells a sob story about the loss of some loss of a child to some truck driver rendered incompetent or inattentive due to some chemical haze upon his mind. Of course nobody wants a sex-offender as a schoolteacher. People could get away with such mistakes when America relied more heavily upon manufacturing, mining, and construction and less upon bureaucracies for employment. Selling bricks pilfered from a construction site or spark plugs 'lifted' from the auto plant is not an easy way to get money for heroin or to support a gambling habit. Selling a high-priced watch, purse, or jewels taken from one's employer is a far easier way than supporting or covering for a bad habit. In Silicon Valley the latest computer chip (high value to size, as if jewelry, and highly fungible) was a favored commodity of thieves.

I have worked for a department store whose security apparatus operated on the assumption that every employee is a thief waiting for an opportunity to get away with some larceny. Such degrades work that itself ensures poverty and humiliation and makes the company seem a gilded cage.

Hey, let's carry this to its "logical" conclusion: The soon as everyone is born, they are raised in prison until they can prove they are law-abiding - and then and only then are they to be released.

The 'logical conclusion' is to make all but members of elite families into serfs in a New Feudalism that grafts the repression of Communism onto a plutocratic order. The serfs are obliged to endure poverty, humiliation, and gross uncertainty of life with the obligation to give effusive praise of their exploiters and abusers out of fear of the consequences of any slip-up. The common man is obliged to be a Pangloss, but not so much on the misfortunes of others -- but on the misfortunes of oneself.

...We are just beginning to see a conflict between our economic order and government responsible to the People.