But this is of course palpable nonsense. The entire point of kings and aristocracy was to formalise the notion that the de facto elite was in fact a class of people so superior to everyone else as to render the notion that they should be held accountable for their actions by mere commoners as laughable. The difference between a king and a president isn't that the latter's status as an elite is more ambiguous, but that the president has some semblance of accountability to the public whereas with the king, it's a case of the public being accountable to the king.
They certainly would not be more accountable if their appointments were more aristocratic in character (i.e. they inherited them from their ancestors who had been appointed for arbitrary reasons by an unelected monarch) and, like aristocrats, they didn't have to explain how and why they exercised the powers given to them.
The "easier" route is for the legislature to "see" the ruling and pass a law that counter-acts it. The general public can _also_ call their own Constitutional conventions and pass amendments to the Constitution to hold SCotUS responsible.
The real "problem" is all of these solutions, by design, require significant effort. If you want changes, you will need to make them happen.
A political mechanism defined on paper does not mean anyone will ever invoke it.
Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.
The stage elaborate public things to legitimize their power.
The Pharaohs themselves lived an entirely 'stage performed' existence to convince the plebes of their ostensible legitimacy.
There are 'other groups' with power, whereupon the public knowledge of their influence would be to their detriment, and they were not 'aristocrats' though they would have probably desperately like to be that.
This is only true in a limited sense. The single most important justification for the King's power has been his divine right: a doctrine of preordained power that no earthly force can usurp. This works pretty well on illiterate peasants who fear divine retribution, but the cat is more or less out of the bag on that front.
And note: that is the justification for power, which defines its perception. A king's true source of power has historically been his wealth (and therefore the size of his army and supporting court), or the support of extremely wealthy parties (churches, merchant classes, etc.). Every regent in history has gone to extraordinary lengths to keep the public from realizing that he is just a man, one whose wealth (and therefore power) can be taken.
This is largely why the French Revolution was so vehemently opposed by foreign leaders and why they tried almost everything to get another king on the throne in France or to destroy it trying. It was a living, breathing, functioning and preferable alternative to monarchy. If not clamped down upon it was only a matter of time until it spread.
There's an opposing side to this dichotomy though: embrace competition. American democracy, with its separation of powers, is an example of this. The founding fathers explicitly set the government at odds with itself, because when "ambition is made to counteract ambition", the ambitious are so busy fighting each other that ordinary businessmen and citizens can go about their business relatively unmolested.
To answer your question: I'd absolutely work for an anarcho-tyrannist firm where I have no idea who the CEO is and managers can fire me on a moments whim, as long as I can walk into another firm tomorrow and get a new job. Job loss is only traumatic if all your eggs are in that one basket; if there's always another job waiting for you, just go get fired and take it.
There's a tension between full capitalism, which often becomes inefficient because entrenched interests prioritize persistence of the institution over fulfillment of the institution's mission, and full competition, which often becomes inefficient because it cannot generate the institutional knowledge needed to run things efficiently. Bureaucracy and mature big companies are on the former side of the scale, bullshit startups and "artisan" (read: overpriced and poor quality) small businesses on the latter.
My ideal social system would make this tension explicit and create automatic mechanisms to break up large institutions and re-form them out of the skilled individual contributors at the bottom. Something like the California labor laws, where you cannot enforce non-compete agreements and it's very difficult to prove that the startup which just spun off stole your trade secrets. Probably even moreso, and applied to the government itself, as CA business climate has recently become relatively hostile to startups as well.
One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves.
But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.
EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.
> why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?
The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?)
> Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power.
Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.
> A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not.
"Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter.
In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?
Again, power is a pervasive feature of any complex society. Do you pick formal and legitimized power, or power that's completely illegitimate and shorn of any formality?
> Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.
If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.
This is specious reasoning. There's a process that turns both of us into mulch (it involves a woodchipper), but you shouldn't attempt that process based on the inference that a reverse process (a mulch-to-human machine?) must therefore exist.
It was not an "acknowledged thing." It was a bloody, brutal affair. Men fighting for titles is probably the one thing that measures up to religion in terms of lives lost.
And all of this before refuting the central point: the duke of some random duchy in 1305 had no "increased social legitimacy" in any way that matters to contemporary humans. He was able to petition whatever king he served, and he could rule over his own land insofar as someone with a bigger army didn't mind. It is, on face value, ridiculous that we're discussing this as a viable state of affairs.
I think you are making the mistake of reading too hard into these writings and somehow managed to invent a meaning in it. The reality is unfortunately as simple as that these people imagine they would get to be kings and rule over everyone. The philosophy dropout verbose word vomit is required to obscure this simple and obviously idiotic point because of course why would anyone pay attention to it otherwise.
Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.
As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.
You can somewhat mitigate that by emphasizing perseverance, grit and commitment character traits, and reward those appropriately at the policy layers. Especially in employer roles, where those traits have been markedly lacking in the modern era. But that only takes you to around 15-20% say. At say 15% that still leaves about 1,185,000,000 people in the world steadily getting left behind in the burgeoning global economy. Even if you take the most aggressive estimates to filter that further, that's still a distributed population of around say 2-500 million. It doesn't make it any better that many of their jobs are prime candidates for replacement by increased automation unless they are in last-bastion niches (some of them quite large still, but with really bad compensation) that will only fall to Moravec-class robots.
There are no easy solutions here, it is a thicket of third rail politics, and incredibly nasty, unpleasant historical echos. But we must walk this difficult and treacherous road ahead of us with eyes open, lest we lose our humanity by trying to sweep this trend under the rug with patches to existing policies like these "We need to return to kings and aristocracy" proposals. We need better patches (IMHO; I'm not a fan of trying out Second System Syndrome with wholesale changes at the societal level, I'm more in favor of trying out incremental patches that are auto-sunset after a pre-determined fixed period unless overridden by a future generation's vote).
A real king would probably slaughter people like Thiel and his hangers on and take whatever money they have.
The schadenfreude from seeing that would be one of the few up-sides of finding myself under a new monarch.
Which he clarified this way after so much outrage.
"It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better."
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
> But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
His talk of women being a "problem" in politics is just one example of this broader theme in the article. He talks about establishing a new territory (where /who/ would rule exactly?), he complains about welfare recipients and champions economic depressions without a care for the lives they ruin.
This isn't even taking into account the evidence for what libertarian politics actually create (the Gilded Age is instructive) or the fact that capitalists who get too fed up of either liberal reform or socialist agitation tend to ally themselves with, or outright create, fascists, as Thiel is doing nowadays with Trump, Yarvin and Blake Masters.
It's clear to me that he's moving down the pipeline from libertarian to fascist, as many have done before him.
Protectionist policies, focus on national identity, celebration of traditional values and gender roles; a “national CEO” whose transformative powers transcend the slow, frustrating democratic machinery. This describes both Putinism and the American right’s goals. It’s not a coincidence that they were increasingly cozy with Russia until Putin rolled into Ukraine.
Putinists love to make the claim that Ukraine isn’t a real nation (and Steve Bannon went on record to agree). It’s worth noting that the same arguments would apply to Canada. If the Thiel-funded right succeeds, they’ll eventually need a war to fuel the nationalist fire. Why not a reunification of the North American colonies? Canada is obviously controlled by decadent forces that need to be purged, just like Ukraine…
Trump wanted to buy Greenland. Good old territorial expansion is part of this value system.
That's silly. Canada is the loyalist colony. They are still part of the Commonwealth. If Theil is a monarchist, then surely Canada is more the good guy to him!
And we should question how "anti-Progressive" monarchism actually is. Given that the American Revolution was driven in large part by a desire to expand beyond the Appalachians (which King George III had banned with the Proclamation of 1763), and that the Empire banned slavery outright in 1833, a full 30 years before Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, I think we can say that First Nations and enslaved peoples -- focus of core Progressive causes -- would have both been better off as subjects of the Crown, in a Loyalist America.
So maybe monarchism is good?
As an American, that just makes no emotional sense. My lifetime experience is that Americans just plain don't think about Canada much, and it wouldn't make much sense as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." Mexico makes far more sense in that regard. Canada (or at least parts of it) would probably be most useful as place for political enemies to be forced into exile.
I'm under the vague impression that Ukraine has a much more important place in the Russian psyche than Canada is in the US one. There are always important differences in the details with stuff like this, so it's not very enlightening to do a mad libs style substitution
When a place is a void in the public’s mind, that’s the ideal target to fill it with nationalist fury. The people of Belgrade didn’t think very often about Bosnia in 1980; thirteen years later their leaders were running a genocide to cleanse Bosnia of the elements that supposedly threatened Serbian unity.
Yeah, but that's moving the goalposts. I was only commenting on suitability as a target for "a war to fuel the nationalist fire." There are already hooks for that w.r.t. Mexico, but they'd have to be created out of whole cloth for Canada.
It’s because the advantages are either theoretical and illusionary, or only enjoyable by an extremely narrow oligarchy.
It’s like asking why North Korea seems to have all the disadvantages of Stalinism but none of the advantages.
[1] https://splinternews.com/leaked-emails-show-how-white-nation...
[2] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right...
Also, the classic alt-right threat of "if you keep calling us fascists then I guess we'll become fascists" is... Basically just an admission of being a fascist, or at least proto-fascist? It's not the "gotcha" you think it is.
[edit] also, voting for Trump doesn't make you a fascist. Plenty of different interest groups voted for him and most of them, I would say, aren't fascistic.
edit: so people told you you were a fascist and, to own the libs, you decided to abandon what you believed in? must've been a pretty tenuous belief for you to switch from pro-liberty to pro-authoritarianism so easily, but so many libertarians do so that it's unsurprising. it's almost like capitalism is inherently authoritarian...
I just assume you fell down the alt-right pipeline and had conservative talking heads like Tucker Carlson convince you into becoming fascist.
No, the libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is a little more nuanced than that.
It happens due to accepting the impossibility of a free society, and it goes something like this:
1. I want to be left alone and leave others alone, and freely contract and associate with whomever I want.
2. The left won't let me do this, and they're willing to use force to ensure it.
3. The far-right also advocates using force, which I'm against, but the society they envision much more closely aligns with my own vision, and I would enjoy greater freedom under their regime than I would working to death in Gulag Part Deux.
4. If voluntaryism is literally impossible due to the authoritarians, my best gamble here is to align with the least-bad authoritarians and hope we can dismantle the worst parts of it when the dust settles.
Ironically, with your claim that voluntarily agreed to employment contracts are "exploitation", you turned out to support Communism, which is the ideology used by privileged unions to legitimize their privilege, and which has led to the creation of the most totalitarian states in history, while you falsely accuse any one who opposes Communism of being a genocidal fascist.
You're framing this as libertarians versus Stalinism or something like that, I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements, that sort of thing. Fascists pop up in the face of some pretty milquetoast leftist agitation - see the parent commenter who decided to become a fascist because leftists were mean to them.
I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition), but that didn't come up in this thread at all so I'm not sure where you're bringing that in from.
It is also the most destructive ideology in history, that has created the most totalitarian states that man has been subjected to.
Those who believe in your ideology will always side with anti-libertarians, and advocate centralization of power to stifle the individual, because Communism deems man, in his natural state, as evil, and glorifies efforts to stifle him as good.
>>I do believe that voluntary contracts can be exploitative (because they can by definition),
By definition, they cannot. If both parties choose to engage in the trade, no one was exploited. Marxism claims otherwise, in order to villify a free society and those who champion it, and legitimize anti-libertarian ideologies like Communism.
>>I was thinking more unionisation, social-democratic movements
You framed it as death camp supporting fascists versus your political camp, implying libertarians are in the former, and now you take issue with me calling your camp Communists.
We've had to ask you this multiple times before. Not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: since your account has clearly been using HN primarily (maybe even exclusively) for ideological battle, and that's the line at which we ban accounts, I've banned this one.
For past explanations about why we draw the line this way, see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... We do this regardless of which ideology an account is battling for or against—it's tedious and destructive of what HN is for, irrespective of which side people are on.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email [email protected] and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I framed fascists as the death camp ones and a variety of left wing causes from outright revolutionary communism to social democratic positions as the opposition, and said that libertarians often pick the former over the latter. I'm not sure what about my argument you are struggling to follow - it's a widely acknowledged historical tendency. Yknow, IBM's holocaust computers and all that.
We've also had to ask you this multiple times before. Also not cool.
Since it doesn't look like you've been using HN primarily for this, I haven't banned your account, but if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit—regardless of how wrong other commenters are or you feel they are—we'd appreciate it.
I'm not expecting a reply because I know moderating this place must keep you busy, but it's a legitimate bind and the guidelines aren't very instructive. From an intent perspective, I'm not trying to sling mud, I think legitimate discussion of political perspectives is interesting and important.
Are there many others? FP seems more focused on essays targeted at an audience of one written for ver specific inside baseball reasons. HBR and the likes have become laughable top 10 lists and passing superficial junk.
I want to learn more about the politcal theory and relevant social economic grand thinking and mechanisms design.
It’s a solid concept imo. But also nothing about their podcasts seem so bad as to wash them away with one flippant comment.
This is the very definition of ad hominem -- you don't want to confront the messages of the essay, so you try to discredit it by highlighting that one of its authors had opinions you disagree with.
Public intellectuals need to be constantly judged and re-evaluated in the light of their actual predictive capacity. Burja certainly presents as an intelligent person, but since I’ve been paying attention to him the value of his insight has been dubious.
I really wish more people knew that Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief at the Atlantic, literally beat political prisoners bloody while he was an IDF prison guard at the world's largest detainment camp.
Samo Burja, the author, is undoubtedly a more serious and educated person. However, he promotes a “Great Founder Theory” which is not so very different from the old “great man theory” of history.
To a large extent, I applaud anyone who can make a good living grifting off of Thiel’s self-regard, but most political economy essays should be read skeptically, and doubly so for anything in Palladium.