The One Percent Aristocracy

An aristocracy is rule by the elite. They rule because they have the power to, and of course they aren't elected. The aristocrats exploit every available intellectual lever to assert that they themselves are best and know whats best for society always-of course that means they must concentrate wealth, enslave inventors, make home ownership a disposable good and rent everyone a mortgage through global banks while digging 20,000 miles of tunnels after South African minerals useless for anything else and nothing at all on the moon for scientific research.

Unelected, non-representative government is the bummer of all the victims of the cranks that have the power to coerce everything their own way. It may take various forms of course; less than oligarchy, more than an Imperial Russian table of ranks without a Tsar.

Aristocracy develops like a network of cancer metastasizing throughout the body politick. Those networks of power coagulate and strangle the free enterprise of the masses of society through their mass power over the marketplace of real property and ideas.

Without reform aristocracy today drives society in a Lemmingway charge toward eventual corporate oblivion like Rowdy Yates herding cattle to Abilene. It isn't a rationally designed or responsive society-it is one making accident and unthinking social politics a virtue, one that opts for pagan trust in evolution and the mystical guiding hand and fickle finger of fate rather than intentional human intelligence and free will guiding maximized individual free enterprise to keep society and the ecosphere functioning.

Aristocracy may develop in world civilization today through corporatism. The concentration of wealth and co-option of democracy and polity (polity is representative while democracy is direct) in the U.S.A. is a fact of life. The rich own the broadcast media, and the government and the networks of society.

The rich pay just 35% in taxes and 15% in capital gains. That is going up next year or 2013 to 20% however they are making up for it by making a 10% capital gains tax on the poorest 10% who presently pay 0%. The rich get their contribution back through federal economic infrastructure support anyway.

Obviously the rich believe they earn their money and wouldn't change a thing. They take their value system for granted, and getting them to cooperate with a reform of capitalism that would be inclusive of the well being of all the people of the nation and environment would be impossible. The rich already comprise a kind of idiot aristocracy working against the survival of human and other forms of life on Earth in a free, functional and healthy ecosphere with liberty and justice for all. One that aspires even unto reverence for God.

Adam Smith' s theory of capitalism wasn't intended to be an abstract math theory of economics detached from its effect upon society. Smith and his friend David Hume sought the liberation of people from aristocracy rather than their enslavement under advantaged class tyrants by any name that dominated business. It is o.k. to reform capitalism to make it work for the poor too without lapsing into state authoritarianism.