economically well-off or free?

[Stratego]

[Mathurin]

[Stratego]

We're not talking about after you get arrested, we're talking about before you get arrested. If you're poor in an Indian slum, there's no guarantee that you won't be arrested for something you didn't do. Actually, we don't have to talk about being poor in an Indian slum; we can just talk about being poor and black in the US. US is considered a free society, but if you're poor and black, there is a heighten chance that you'd be convicted of a crime you didn't do. But even if you're not committed of a crime, you're poor, so there isn't much freedom to do anything since most of your time would be concentrated on making enough money to support your family.

Being poor and being free is mutually exclusive if you want to operate in a society that runs on money.

[PoS]

Rich in a dictatorship- hell yeah!

Ive actually experienced that knowing the right people in an oppressive country can entitle you to get away with a lot more than even the "freest" countries in the West.

[Stratego]

The problem is that the word "freedom" has been hijacked and is now used interchangeably with "democracy" (the form of government utilizing elections, not the idea of people rule). This resulted in questions like the one posed in the OP.

We tend to think that people are free when the society engaged in elections. In reality, they're not, they're just voting. We think that people living in the slums of India (or even the ghettos of America) are free, but they're not. They're just voting (or at least not barred from voting).

[lil bit]

[Mathurin]

[Stratego]

Those things only apply if you are at least middle class. If you're poor and black, you get shot in the back or put away in jail for 20 years because some white lady couldn't tell black people apart.

[Sazari]

[Revenant]

being rich is being free