> The idea of those who favor "kings and aristocracy" is more that we'll always have people around with more power than others (elites), and that formal transparency about who these people are ultimately improves accountability

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.

There are plenty of people in current government who are de facto not accountable to the public. Sometimes that lack of accountability is even intended by design. Are Supreme Court Justices accountable to the public for their interpretation of the law?

I said semblance of accountability for a reason. Still, Supreme Court justices are appointed in limited number by elected politicians - who have to justify the appointment based on their supposed professional credentials - to discharge a specific set of duties

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.

On paper, SCotUS _can_ be held accountable by the public through their representatives. The process is called impeachment. The house _can_ impeach a sitting Justice, and the Senate _can_ vote to remove them from office. This currently is unlikely, but the it _is_ possible.

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.

They can be impeached. So I think if their interpretation was wildly wildly wrong, they could be impeached.

But impeach a majority of them? Impossible in reality.

I’d be shocked if even one is.

A political mechanism defined on paper does not mean anyone will ever invoke it.

In what meaningful sense are kings and aristocrats "formally transparent"? The history of aristocracy (historical and contemporary) is the history of hiding money and power. The arc of liberal democracy has consistently bent away the kinds of secrets and implicit power structures that aristocracies thrive on.

? The history of aristocracy is about amplifying perception of power.

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.

> Everyone knows who the King and Duke are and what their means of power are.

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.

And so the Declaration of Independence was a direct shot against that. "All men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights" is a direct attack against the divine right of kings (and nobles).

The justification matters less than the ever present belief that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative

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.

Who guarantees the "kings and aristocrats" are really the ones pulling the strings? They are frequently just puppets.

Puppets of whom? The only (European) historical examples of puppet masters I can think of are the Church and other nobility — certainly no one from outside the class. If a merchant became powerful enough, they found a way to join the nobility, either directly or by marriage.

Turks and janissaries.

Janissaries were not kings and aristocracy. They were kidnapped kids forcefully turned into soldiers. They were kind of slaves.

We are all just puppets enslaved by the processes we create and confused by our limited experience.

It's interesting: Thiel's "truth that few people agree with you" is that capitalism & competition are antonyms, not complements. And he's in favor of the "capitalism" side. His whole business career is about eliminating competition and enjoying monopoly rents. A return to "kings and aristocracy" is the ultimate culmination of this: a king has ultimate monopoly power over the kingdom, where they not only own all the land, but have ultimate say over everything that goes on in the kingdom.

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.

The separation of powers could be expanded to a far greater extent. In particular the modern bureaucratic state, with its long-term sinecure positions at the highest levels, is entirely antithetical to the whole idea of checks and balances, or "ambition being made to counteract ambition". This is where former aristocracies might provide a better model.

I'd agree with that.

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.

That, of course, is ultimately extremely defeatist compared to the ideals that the USA claims (the practice and history, on the other hand, would be another discussion).

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.

In the internal logic of these claims, it's not "defeatist" so much as looking at things as they are. 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. It's not about renouncing egalitarian ideals at all, it's being serious about pursuing them to the greatest feasible extent.

> 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.

There's a neat little rhetorical trick you're doing here:

> 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?

> ...it's about formalizing and legitimizing power.

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.

> 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's not like I'm inventing anything here. Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing. Far more reversible than things like the guillotine, which in practice was way more comparable to your human-to-mulch machine - and that in its long-range society-wide effects, as much as its more immediate ones.

> Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing.

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.

That wasn't just men fighting for titles, it was quite literally men fighting for their turf. The modern equivalent would be an all-out war among drug cartels. Later on, with the onset of the early modern era powerful monarchies managed to check the violence and gradually turned noble titles into more of a social reward for public services rendered. This is the context that those who view "kings and aristocracies" positively might have in mind.

Well, that's an interesting point. Before we follow some far-right vision of restoring the nobility, we'd better find out exactly which version they have in mind. We'd also better think seriously about what constraints are going to be able to prevent it from turning into the worse version.

These fancy historical metaphors should be put next to actual modern examples of monarchy in action: the British and European aristocracy and the covert power they wield and the hidden wealth they hoard, the House of Saud and other Gulf Arab royals and their excesses, and what is the ruling regime of the DPRK if not a virtual monarchy under the Kims?

What nonsense. Generally the only way to remove a title was war, or in the rare case of a sufficiently powerful liege, to commit a serious crime against the them.

Bullshit. Invent any new title you want, you will still get powerful people who aren't holders of that title and whom control the holders of that title. If thats all you wanted, inventing a new position won't do shit. This only furthers the argument that what you actually wanted if that was your goal is to start severely limiting the power of someone who reaches a certain level of wealth or influence etc.

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.

>>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.

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.