It's a conflict of interest of course. The good thing is that it hurts a lot of people, especially people with disposable income with the power to change things

It's a conflict of interest of course. The good thing is that it hurts a lot of people, especially people with disposable income with the power to change things, and especially people with stores of capital/influence. It's like a SaaS product, where sales/marketing (the most important division of a company) literally cannot do their jobs if engineering-provided services go down. It's much less easy to gouge engineering in such a situation than say releasing a waterfall build, and having it fail after the sale. If POTUS & Co. restrained themselves to separating children at the border and disappearing them into pedophile rings that they may frequent later (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/children-separated-border-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/nyregion/children-separat...), people may not be as outraged, because it doesn't affect them. Instead, they flaunt their power in our faces, in a way that may affect our physical safety. They don't whisper, and that's good. What would be really concerning is if people think this is okay, and the people with means realize the only way to really stay safe in a world where laws don't mean too much is to become part of the government, like in Russia. Then you have things like ambulance limos (https://jalopnik.com/ultra-rich-russians-hire-fake-ambulances-to-drive-them-458478316 https://jalopnik.com/ultra-rich-russians-hire-fake-ambulance...). I wouldn't know how to work backwards from that.