Western Europe and the Anglosphere are suffering from two bad ideas interlinked like a DNA double helix.
On one side, we have this belief in capitalism, that says the current distribution of wealth and income is right and just, and any method short of armed robbery used to get even richer while making others even poorer is also right and just.
On the other side, we have this demented belief that all people are created equal thanks to the Enlightenment, and that therefore it isn't right or just for anyone to be more accomplished, have more or better looking wives, or have a higher wealth balance or income than anyone else.
These two theories should be in direct contradiction to each other but the proponents of these theories have managed to circumvent the issue by saying individuals can differ in their willingness to work hard (why? weren't they born equal?), but of course this variance should not produce any statistical gaps between categories of people because the random variations between individuals should all even out.
So we have the greatest wealth inequality in at least the last century if not in US history combined with the theory that all recognizable categorizations of people ought to be equal.
Go figure things haven't worked out. The inequality does span across groups as well as individuals, so we now have two choices -- abandon capitalism or abandon the Enlightenment.
Actually we should abandon both.
Capitalism is a crock of shit. The only thing people should be recompensed for is the value added they bring to a situation. Value added should not equal the entire value of the product, but only the value you uniquely bring to the situation, which someone or something else couldn't have done in your place. For instance, if you're a farmer, 99% of the value of your product has nothing to do with you, it has solely to do with the energy of the sun, the water irrigating your crops, and the soil that nurtures them, as well as the DNA of the crops themselves which use these ingredients to grow.
Anyone, given a sun, water, soil and genetically engineered seeds could produce a bountiful harvest. The amount of labor you put in that adds to this bounty is a pitiful percentage of the whole. What you're doing is relying on property rights to shoot anyone else who attempts to make use of your land and do the labor themselves so that you can claim the rights to the entire finished product by scattering a few seeds around or perhaps ordering your automated tractor to automatically harvest your crops at the end of the growing season.
It's patently absurd. It was already absurd for the nobility to be demanding rent from the serfs while contributing nothing, just owning land, in the Medieval era. It's still just as absurd now, in the age of mechanized planting and weeding and harvesting, for landowners to claim they have any rights to the product of their land. Literally all they had to do was push a button on an app.
To make matters worse, most of these farmers are only rich because they were given generous water rights permits by the local government authority, a shared natural resource that by rights should belong equally to everyone. In addition, governments often subsidize farmers by buying their crops or bailing them out when the harvest is bad. Some farmers are given unnatural monopolies via licensing -- they're the only ones in America who can grow peanuts, sugar, or whatever, even though there's no physical reason why this would have to be. Finally they even pay farmers to grow corn simply to burn it as 'ethanol', one of the worst uses of land imaginable. Why do they give farmers billions for corn going completely to waste? Because Iowa is the first primary in the election cycle and farmers have the vote. It's naked extortion.
Farmers also rely on the import of illegal immigrant laborers who then receive massive welfare benefits from the State, meaning they don't have to pay a living wage and just dump all their workers' expenses on the rest of us.
Simone Biles can do gymnastics tricks no one else in the world can. LeBron James can lead the hapless Cavaliers to an NBA title. They deserve their pay. No one can replace them. The question is how true is that in other fields of the economy? I've shown with farming that everyone involved is just a crook relying on government force to make their money.
If all farmers died tomorrow and new people were allowed to move in and farm the exact same land, we'd probably end up richer than ever before. Admittedly farmers have valuable knowledge that we would lose, but when you look at all the economic distortions farmers rely on to profit off of us, we'd still come out ahead by abolishing the whole system and starting over. Their marginal utility, their value added, is actually negative. They're nothing but parasites.
What's true of farmers is true of everyone else. Teachers, for instance, have not shown they add any value to the world. IQ is a better predictor of scholastic success than what teachers the students had. It turns out if you're smart you can learn anything easily under any conditions, and if you're stupid you'll never learn anything no matter what teachers do. So why even have any teachers? What service are they providing? They aren't actually teaching anyone. The students all rise to their natural level naturally on their own. Home schooled children regularly outperform public school students on all standardized tests. That should've been a hint.
What about doctors and lawyers? The licenses required restrict the service providers' numbers, creating an unnatural monopoly. There's no evidence these licenses are necessary to provide effective care to patients. In fact, in the military, field surgeon techniques are taught without any elaborate medical school degrees and lives are saved just fine.
As for lawyers, perhaps the courts are set up in such a way that only knowledge of the law can win a case in court, but why should that be? Just change the law to something simple and just that any good person would approve of, and poof, there goes the need for lawyers. You hardly even need judges. An artificial intelligence program could immediately conclude all disputes just by checking its simple flowchart routine.
America has 11 times as many lawyers as the second most lawyered up country on Earth. It is impossible to say these lawyers are performing a necessary service, or that the law should always be so complicated that it takes this many lawyers. Everywhere else on Earth has not found this to be the case. It's only America that finds itself overrun with lawyers feasting upon a ludicrously over-complicated law code.
While we're at it the entire rest of the world spends about 1/5 as much on health care and still has a longer expected lifespan than us. Doctors are ripping us off and they aren't even providing anything in return. It's all a giant scam.
Now let's move on to CEO's. There's nothing more ludicrous than these tech billionaires like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc. Their product is a simple code that anyone can replicate with a couple years of training. It's a word processor, a concept we've understood for decades now. Why are they so rich? Because of a natural monopoly. Consumers and producers want to be around as many other people as possible, so that they have more opportunities. This implies that there should only ever be one social network where everyone can commingle. They make use of this natural monopoly, as the head of this single social network, to extract massive rents. Not because they added any particular value or did anything special, but simply because people need there to be only one network in order to communicate with each other (just like it's more efficient for everyone to be speaking the same language), and they were the lucky one decided upon by the arbitrary whims of fate.
Amazon as 'the' online retailer where everyone goes to sell and everyone comes to buy is great for everyone. It means you as a consumer can find any product you need by visiting a single site, and likewise you as a producer can reach all the consumers on Earth by marketing at a single site. This is a natural monopoly which will always form. It didn't have to be Amazon, it could've been anyone, it just had to be someone. Amazon had the most user-friendly interface so Amazon it was. So maybe the coders of Amazon did add some small value to the world, via the 1-click shopping button or whatever, but the main benefit was the natural monopoly, and yet Bezos is the richest man on Earth not for the tiny value added but for the natural monopoly he's coasting on.
Car and airplane companies are so notoriously bailed out and subsidized by the government that I hardly need to comment on them.
What about insurance companies? The whole thing is a scam -- you're required to buy car insurance by law, and health insurance is quasi-required (at least employers are required to buy it for their employees, and then given a massive subsidy to do so). What is the value added of these insurance companies? I can't think of any. If the government insists that no one ever get unlucky in life, they could directly bail out the unfortunate themselves. Why pay money to a third party to do it for them? Why enrich a middleman?
Real estate is another scam. The value of your property has nothing to do with your own labor, but only to do with how prosperous and safe your neighborhood is -- something you had nothing to do with. If, for example, you were the neighborhood's menace, causing all the problems in the neighborhood, then your property would be worth more than everyone else's -- because the moment you sold and left your house would be heaven to live in (no neighborhood problems at all!). This goes to show how unmerited real estate fortunes are. They're dependent on community wide contributions and yet you reap the entire reward. If someone is lucky enough to own a shack or a hovel in a booming city like NYC or San Francisco they're instant millionaires. They could have built that overnight with a hammer and some driftwood and it would still sell for millions.
If housing is so easy to build and worth so much, why isn't there more of it? Of course because of government zoning rules that say you can't build any more housing within city limits. Now, maybe this is a good idea because it keeps traffic less congested. I think it's a bad idea and we should build higher and higher until the price of real estate drops back down to the price of building the real estate, but at least that's debatable. What isn't debatable is that, yet again, you're benefiting from a government imposed monopoly, a housing shortage due solely to coercion, which means you didn't earn it at all.
As for coal or oil or minerals found in the ground, obviously you don't deserve to be enriched by that. It's the collective property of the whole nation, or even all of mankind if we want to be fair. God created those valuables, not you, so who are you to claim them for a profit?
People do a lot of labor to suck them out of the ground? Well, okay, but there's plenty of people who would be happy to do that labor and receive that level of pay, and it doesn't require any hard education to do so, so what of it? In the end you only got that job because you bought the government license to mine the area, which forbids any other laborers from going in and doing the job for you. In the end it was just another artificial monopoly. When you take into account the external pollution costs you inflict on the outside world and don't have to pay a cent for, you're probably only contributing negative value to the rest of us while raking it in.
Bankers were given the monopoly right to print money out of thin air. They're then allowed to loan this money out with interest, and once the loan is repaid they get to keep all the free money they had previously created, for free, by just clicking the '0' button a few times on their keyboard. Talk about easy work. There's no downside. If the loan isn't repaid, the government rushes in to bail you out by gifting you with another ten trillion, as demonstrated in 2007 and now with the coronavirus. Loan as much as you want, make as many bad loans as you please, the money spigot will never end. You'll never personally be punished for any bad decisions you make. All the costs will flow down to the taxpayers whose dollars were just inflated for your sake. It's the biggest ripoff in history, and yet bankers are some of the highest paid people in America. Tell me exactly how they earned one dime of that?
Theoretical capitalism would mean discovering the value added you bring to a situation and compensating you accordingly. It would involve discussing whether you were better for the job than anyone else on Earth who might have wanted to do that job. It would involve discussing how much of your pay is based off of luck, i.e., benefiting from a monopoly, and how much of it came from your own efforts.
Insofar as your pay stems from luck, you should have to distribute all that money equally to everyone else who didn't get lucky but was just as deserving theoretically of those profits. I suspect the vast majority of most people's income would be in the form of these collective distributions -- payments to offset the fact that we weren't given water rights, mineral rights, real estate in the nice part of a boom town, the license to become a doctor, etc. Only a smidgen of pay would go to your actual production at your actual job. And as a result, other than star athletes, genius inventors, megahit authors and the like, who really are irreplaceable (hundreds of millions of people have tried to overtake One Piece but no one has, proving no one can), your pay for the actual work you do would be minuscule.
If you don't like your now lower-paid-job you're free to quit. There's 7.7 billion other people who'd be happy to do it for you and take all your capital in order to do so. Most of the time no one would even notice since your job wasn't producing anything anyway and only existed via government mandate. (see ethanol, burning).
Many Enlightenment thinkers, like Rousseau, immediately jumped to communism as the natural conclusion of their philosophy. Others tried to stop halfway, like Locke. They said all 'artificial inequality' should be abolished but it was okay for a 'natural aristocracy' to get ahead in life via their talents. The problem with this is it's obviously absurd to give everyone co-equal power in governance but leave all the money in the hands of a 'deserving few.' Once you say everyone should have the vote, where do you think that property is going to go? Why would we vote for a few billionaires to own the world?
If you think everyone is equally deserving of power then, inevitably, property will flow towards the 'everyone' that has the power to divvy it up. Communism is inevitable. You can make some hand-wavy argument about how an enlightened populace would be happy to reward hard workers who produce great amounts of wealth by letting them keep vast fortunes for themselves, but this argument is getting real tired and worn out. How does a millennial who can't afford a home or start a family benefit from Bezos owning 100+ billion dollars? How is it in his enlightened self-interest not to eat the rich? He's already at rock bottom, evolutionarily. He's about to die out and go extinct. What does he have to lose?
If everyone had a middle class life and two children then yes, you might start wanting to reward productive captains of industry for their services rendered. Until then you're better off plundering them. And guess where we are in America today? Only 1/3 of millennials are married. Meanwhile, the 'captains of industry' are rolling around in unprecedented wealth. When corona struck and we lost all our savings, they somehow managed to accumulate even more tens of trillions to themselves. It's sickening.
In my system of government, whichever heroic group of leaders emerge to found a new nation -- via revolutionary war or just pioneering spirit would be the dictators of that nation. They would then appoint their successors, who would appoint their successors, forever. Power would never be in the hands of the people. There would be no voting. Because the original leaders earned it through their actual deeds, and then their successors earned it by impressing the original leaders.
This method was used during the golden age of the Roman Empire (Antoninus-Nerva-Aurelius-Trajan-Hadrian) and there's no reason it couldn't still work today. If it's true that Clodius assassinated his father Aurelius and lied when he said Aurelius had appointed him heir, then there was actually no flaw in the system aside from Rome being duped into believing the perfidy. If Aurelius did appoint Clodius then the flaw was in Aurelius for favoring his son over someone more qualified, and the previous emperor for appointing Aurelius when Aurelius would make such a fatal error.
Having read Marcus Aurelius, his philosophy being so central to his life, I find it hard to believe he would violate his life-long principles as a great ruler and appoint someone like Clodius his heir out of misplaced fatherly sentiment. I think the Gladiator movie was right and he was assassinated. But oh well. Man is fallible, one way or another the system failed, eventually. But it has a far better track record than universal democracy, which will always fail and almost instantly.
We should go back to great men appointing their successors and hope for the best -- it's the best system of governance we ever found. Our Founding Fathers proved themselves in deeds during the Revolutionary War, which is why they were all such excellent presidents all the way through Jackson (who fought in the Revolutionary War as a mere stripling!). If we founded a new nation under new Founding Fathers, that would guarantee us at least fifty years of paradise, just like America's founding gave us.
The Enlightenment should have never abolished the hierarchy. There should always be a ruling class and a powerless peasantry. Peasantry who rule themselves end up at communism, their country in shambles. The monarchy and the aristocracy were parasites, yes, but at least they were a small portion of the population. Now the whole country is nothing but parasites living off of government awarded monopolies and subsidies. The whole thing is rotten from top to bottom.
Plus, the aristocracy wasn't as meritless as people claim. Beautiful and accomplished women of any rank could marry into the aristocracy, taking their superior genes with them into the upper ranks' progeny. In addition, successful knights and well to do merchants could also rise up the ranks and be granted ever higher titles, taking their good genes with them into the aristocracy's progeny. Social mobility was not noticeably stunted in earlier eras compared to today. It's a myth. Scientific studies tracking surnames show no change in the same family lines' success rates under nobility and democracy, or even communism. Read all about it in 'The Son Also Rises.'
If you wanted to make something of yourself, you could always take the path of Sir Francis Drake, ride the high seas as a pirate, sack the Spanish fleet, and be knighted as reward by your Queen. Ambition finds a way.
I wouldn't mind a straight out return to monarchy and aristocracy, with sons inheriting their father's lands and titles and princes taking over from their father the king. I just think revolutionary war heroes appointing anyone they deem fit for the job more scientifically sound. Either would be better than democracy, which as I've said before is rule by Jewish newspaper editorialists, who are the most adept liars and thus sway the largest crowds to vote their way.
The point is the Enlightenment eats itself. By endorsing democracy and free speech it meant liars could say whatever to gullible crowds and the best liars would always rule in the end. There is no other endpoint to this system. Some Enlightenment thinkers were honest about this, like Rousseau, and just jumped straight to communism. Others pretended they were doing something else, but here we are, with Biden leading in the polls, despite promising to destroy our country the moment he takes power. He's going to let the whole world walk across the border and grant all of them the vote, free health care and education. And what will they do with that vote? Of course vote themselves even more welfare. Why not? Until the last penny is plundered why stop? What democratic process would stop them?
Enlightenment thinkers were a bunch of natural aristocrats who chafed under the rule of lessor established aristocrats. Great men who wanted the freedom to do more with their lives. For instance, Voltaire wanted to mock the idea of a God who would miraculously intervene to cure your illness but let earthquakes destroy entire cities full of innocents, but without freedom of speech and freedom of religion he couldn't do that. I get it. I chafe under the rule of my lessors too. But the answer isn't to empower every last voodoo tribesman in Africa as your equal just to stick it to Prince Pumpernickle.
The answer, obviously, was to buy your way into the nobility, or fight your way into it like Napoleon did, or to found an entire new nation like the Pilgrims or the Mormons did. Not level everything and destroy the world. Espousing leveling principles that are convenient to you for the moment but ultimately lead to Cambodia's killing fields are not net positive utility.
Everyone is created equal could not be a more monstrous lie in the age of Darwin's discovery of evolution. Obviously, having evolved to completely unequal biologies, blacks and whites could never be 'created equal.' Strangely enough, the very people insisting Christianity was false kept demanding we were all created equal by some God somewhere, despite all the evidence on Earth saying that wasn't so. If they had been true atheists the first thing they would have founded their philosophy upon, their initial premise, would have been the exact opposite -- 'we all evolved unequal.'
The Enlightenment is at odds with the proven science of innate individual, racial and sexual differences and must be thrown out on the equality issue alone. But it isn't even that, the Enlightenment is also wrong about freedom. Just because everyone wishes to be free doesn't make that the paramount dictate in life. People also all want to be fed. So you see, there are competing interests here. We all want a great many things, so our guiding light, as a utilitarian, should be the greatest good for the greatest number. Does freedom in all things lead to that?
It's demonstrably false. The freest people are hunter-gatherers or kids raised by wolves, under no compulsion at all. Are they the best off? No.
The lives we envy and aspire towards are the people of great accomplishments, people who are greatly beloved, people who can make a great impact upon the world. You can't do that raised by wolves or in the Amazon rainforest.
Our art tells us what a well-lived life looks like, because these are the people we're interested in. It's Aoba Suzukaze from New Game. Kirito from SAO. Goku from Dragon Ball. Natsu from Fairy Tail. Naruto from Naruto. Moritaka from Bakuman. Kou from Cross Game. Umi from Summer Pockets. Nozomi from Pretty Cure. So you have to look at what makes their life so bountiful and it always comes back to being loved and succeeding at the challenging goals they set for themselves.
Which means people need power, i.e., capital, and they need families of their own. The ideal society gives this greatest good to the greatest number. Which means the ideal society has the citizen's dividend and mandatory marriage.
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