Yesterday’s post on my imperial platform gave rise to comment about the sticky issue of generational wealth.
My take on the old money issue largely aligns with Devon Stack‘s. Our rulers’ unprecedented power is the legacy of vast generational wealth their forefathers accumulated decades–even centuries–ago. Their inheritance gives them a nigh-insurmountable advantage in terms of cultural and political influence. This is why, for example, no one has succeeded in creating a viable alternative to any of the Big Tech platforms.
Imagine time as a 500 k marathon track where each kilometer represents one year. It’s a relay race where each runner passes the baton to his kid, who gets to start at the point where his dad finished.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that all our ancestors started on the same line 500 km/years back from us. Due to differences in natural ability, training, and dumb luck, some of the racers pulled ahead. But the others still had a chance to catch up if they pushed themselves. But the math says that at least some of front runners’ kids would maintain their fathers’ lead, and in some cases expand it.
Eventually, some of the 3rd and 4th generation runners way out front would run over the horizon from those trailing behind. A number of them would realize that no one would know if they cheated. So, some of them would indulge the temptation to stop running on foot and hop in golf carts. Their already wide lead, which a runner farther back might have been able to overcome with supreme effort, would double. And when no chance existed of anyone discovering their cheating, the golf cart drivers would switch to sports cars, then bullet trains, then supersonic jets.
What are the odds that the succeeding generations who never had to train, but got to ride out the race on the Concord, are as fit as their ancestors who started running?
This is why we see such gross mismanagement in every sector of commerce. Our rulers have inherited an almost omnipotent machine, but they no longer remember how it works. They have degenerated into a cargo cult that tries to appease the machine with blood rituals and sacrifices.
The machine is incredibly resilient–it was built to be–but one day it will stop. We must make ready for that moment.
In the meantime, don’t give money to people who hate you.
Kind of feel like they didn’t degenerate from some kind of omnipotent place of authority, they were also faking it back then, always lying. It’s just without technology life moved slower, disasters has less consequences, easier to maintain corruption over a longer period. What we are witnessing wrt Afganistan could have happened to a medieval warlord who may have behaved exactly the same way. Probably they would have approached it with more honor to be honest. I do get the appeal that we have degraded from some higher state but I honestly feel like even that is state propaganda in itself, stretching back at least to Enlightenment-era Latin/Roman fetishism. Hard to look at our current leaders and imagine it was must better in the past.
I think it’s safer to say, at least with some of the old money families, that they have degenerated from a place of competence. I hesitate to generalize, because some of their forebears actually built things, while others organized those with the skill to build, and still others sold what had been organized and built. Some were certainly swindlers and cheats. I don’t want to laud the originators of that old money too highly without looking at each family closely. Those families whose fortunes began dishonestly have kept on. Those families that built something could not do so now.
Even if a lack of adversity makes people fat and stupid, would the circumstances have been different if the descendants of the old wealthy elite had taught their kids about the machine? What if they had never befriended the other wealthy families and had forced each of their children into menial labor for two years to make them appreciate their families’ wealth?
I ask this, because this problem extends into the middle class. Many parents worked tirelessly before 9/11 to establish comfortable lifestyles, and they deliberately spoiled their children to keep them from enduring adversity.
This is a problem that’ll never go away because it emerges from the perfectly natural (and let’s not forget, good!) instinct to take care of your children and love them. It’s not a new problem, either, even the Book of Proverbs includes “spare the rod, spoil the child”. It’s just that we’ve forgotten the important of discipline altogether.
Watch all the lolbertarians call you a communist for even suggesting such an idea.
At least communists can claim a few victories.
I don’t know. The ticket takers seem more inclined to give their money back to the death cult that helped them get rich than hand it over to their progeny. Their ability to stay rich is as much a product of cutting the ladder so no one else can climb aboard and their willingness to do the death cult’s bidding.
In the end, it amounts to the same thing. At the moment they are untouchable. We’ll have to wait for them to collapse of their own weight and (as you say) be ready to take advantage of their fall.
Brian
I saw first hand this phenomenon in Singapore. The political elite follow this trend and pontificate with gall about meritocracy.
When they’re mediocrities with undistinguished records
xavier
On one level, the idea that everyone should start at the same place in life and work from there, and that that’s “fair and equitable” — what is sometimes referred to as the blank slate idea — is pure folly. I don’t think it is even worthwhile trying to figure out a society where someone starting at the bottom could make it to the top, given enough hard work applied intelligently.
On another, it is not by and large the scions of wealthy American families that are incompetently running their parents’ businesses into the ground or subverting society. At most you could say they let subversive elements take control of trust funds, or sold off their parents’ companies to international interests. If anything, most of the big NGOs that were movers and shakers in tearing down traditional institutions were either foreign interests to begin with — like Soros’ Tides Foundation, the SPLC, and the ADL — or were funded by trust funds set up by wealthy men who specifically left their own children without controlling interests.
Of course you do have a point as regards wealth and ease being poor motivators for raising men ready to overcome hard times in positions of leadership. It’s a good question to ask, “where are the descendants of Washington, Jefferson, and Adams today?”
Well, I still think you’re wrong on this one. Removing competitors to the state and the major corporations — but I repeat myself – only strengthens them relatively.
However, I do understand that in the Person of the Emperor, Brian the Just, we are not dealing with the State per se.
My compromise suggestion is that we arrange a sortition for families with wealth in the top 1%; those randomly selected will have their entire estate divided and reassigned across society via a lottery. Rather than an ongoing punitive tax, I humbly suggest folding this into a Jubilee or meta-Jubilee year, or perhaps, at higher rates of sortition (I thought perhaps 10% of the sample would be adequate, perhspas 25% for this latter suggestion) as a singular celebration of the Ascent of Brian the Just.
It could be repeated immediately before the ascent of his heir to the throne; those elites celebrating the occasion would be the more sincere for having just learned they personally were not being reassigned to the working class.
Thank you for your considered suggestions. A leader is only as good as his advisors.
You flatter me. My consultation fee is modest, and honour fills all further needs. I am a trifle concerned about now apparently being Catholic however; will I need some sort of hat?
Catholicism will be the official state religion, but other Christian denominations will be tolerated. The old compromises work fine absent a glut of heathens in the mix.
Truly, both an lenient and a tolerant leader!
Your problem is that you’re resorting to sortition. Despite the difficulty of entering Heaven as a rich man, you should only target those individuals or families who have used their wealth for evil. This information will be relatively easy to obtain, even if the CIA immolates itself as a final devotion to Satan.
And if America’s 1% flee to New Zealand, Brian can always extract them. The worst that New Zealand would do is call Brian a bigot.
They’d call me that anyway if they read this blog. The current American regime already taxes expats living overseas, so the billionaire class’ only recourse would be renouncing their citizenship, a condition of which would be forfeiting their wealth. Two birds with one stone.
I admit, some sort of inquisitorial organization raking through a family’s history for deliberate and flagrant evil, as defined by Brian the Just, appeals to my blood-lust.