system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Snowpiercer] Why even have poor people on the train anyway?

I don't get why they have all these carriages filled with poor people when they don't seem to do anything useful at all. They don't work. They don't produce any benefit for the people at the front. They are just trouble waiting to happen.

Also, if they have to have the poor people on there for whatever reason, why don't they pretend that everyone is equally poor? Dress in rags when you go and steal their children or whatever?I guess it'd still be kinda obvious because you'd still need guards. But they could at least pretend not to be sooo rich and talk about how they are hats and whatever.
gpt
Even if most poor people don't produce anything for the people at the front, they aren't a drain on the people at the front either. They have their own independent food supply and (if what Tilda Swinton's character said was true) a separate supply. It only takes two armed guards to keep them docile during inspections or whatever. The cost of having them there is far outweighed by the potential advantages of having a ready supply of free labour for when/if anything breaks down.

Plus, the plan presumably isn't for humanity to live on the train forever and - if the world thaws out and people can build permanent settlements - the rich people aren't going to want to build their own houses and dig their own wells, are they? If the world never thaws, they'll be useful for a bit of genetic diversity as the generations go on. They can be used as egg/sperm donors when a couple of front-ender first-cousins want to have a baby together.

I think it never occurred to the rich people to pretend to be poor because they *enjoyed* lording it over the tail-enders. It sounds like they were basically conspiracy nuts before the end of the world (they say Wilford was one of the only people who knew the world would be frozen, and that people bought tickets for the train, so presumably they believed the same as him else they wouldn't have bothered). Letting them know that things were better down the front is kind of an extended "Ha! We were right all along!" statement, rubbing it in for those who didn't belive them.