Do people think the system works?

I often read comments like "rich people gets away unpunished" or "thugs steal millions and get away with it, while people that shoplift get thrown in jail".<br><br>So my question is, do people think that the system works? When people say this stuff, it sounds like they think that the rich guy is supposed to go to jail and the shoplifter is not supposed to go to jail. But if the system doesn't work, then why do we even expect that the rich guy is supposed to be punished? If it's supposed to not work, then it's not like it's failing to do something that it's supposed to do.<br><br>Technically, a system is a plan for how a process should go. So by definition if a process doesn't work, it's not a system. We do have laws and rules and processes in place, so it is a system. But developing countries with weak rule of law doesn't really have systems in the way that we talk about them. There just isn't much of a plan, or whatever plan that exists is either vague or not widely accepted. But for developed countries, we have very clear systems and plans in place, even if they don't always work the way that they're supposed to.<br><br>So if we expect a system to punish the rich for doing questionable stuff, but the system doesn't work that way, then that means that our expectation for how the system is supposed to work is different from how the system is actually supposed to work. Because if the system is supposed to punish the rich for doing questionable stuff, but the system doesn't work that way, then the system failed with its own goals. But if the system doesn't actually want to punish the rich, and we are just expecting the system to do something that it doesn't want to do, then the system doesn't fail with its own goals. It just fails when judged by our own goals. But since we aren't in control of the system, why would we expect the system to share our goals?