Arguably the distinction between royalty, nobility and commonfolk grew larger the longer the feudal system was in place, to the point where kings inherited entire countries by birthright at the end of the XVIII century.
I would push back slightly and say that this trend is more even and there is less disruption to it than sometimes historians try to present. E.g. the execution of Charles I during the English Civil War of the 17th century is often presented as a sharp break with tradition, but if one accepts that dissatisfactory kings usually wind up murdered via artful legalism combined with some negligent-jailor theater, it just looks like business as usual.
"if he should give up what he has begun, and agree to make us or our kingdom subject to the King of England or the English, we should exert ourselves at once to drive him out as our enemy and a subverter of his own rights and ours, and make some other man who was well able to defend us as our King"
The risk of being overthrown was always there. They had to maintain their power through some combination of force, propaganda, and actual good rulership.
Including having lots of offsprings. Apparently, "not procreating to save the planet" is for the poor.
Seems more sensible to just assume they all negate each other out in the long run, unless proven otherwise by voting records.
As for why we shouldn’t actually care abstractly there simply aren’t that many ultra wealthy. Any subsidies given to them just cost an incredible amount relative to the number of people helped etc. They also don’t directly matter in terms of broad metrics like human health, lifespan, happiness etc.
My point was how we treat ultra wealthy as a political issue is independent from the underlying reality. They aren’t directly outvoting poor people to revive more benefits, it’s instead a question of influence.
Billionaires tend to see positive ROI from getting involved in politics, which is self reinforcing over time. But, stepping back you can judge such systems not in terms of current politics parties operate, but in the broader context of how efficient systems are. In that context the ROI is negative for society even if it can be positive for some individuals that comes at significant cost.
Many millions of people can genuinely believe in something, be on a ‘side’, while being spread across the entire economic spectrum.
At best it can be said to be an ideological differentiation, not an economic differentiation.
It does when the side described was the edges of a distribution.
> wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich
Replace a few words and:
> height distribution, on the one side we have the tall and hyper-tall
Hence why I wrote ‘side’ in quotation marks, because I didn’t fully agree with the original parent comment’s characterization.
e.g. HN user 1 can say X part of the population is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of blue cheese and Y part is on the ‘side’ of the moon being made of cheddar cheese. But future replies by HN user 2 and user 3 are free to treat that as all meaningless gibberish.
It avoids this kind of pointless replies.
So yes please do not reply…
Your behavior is simply unworthy of attempting an intellectual discussion.
Edit: Consider yourself lucky I’m not requesting a mod to ban this account ‘Retric’ for deception.
The site encourages people to delete unproductive comments that haven’t been responding to as it improves the reading experiences for 3rd parties. Which is one of the reasons there’s a big old delete button and you can edit posts for a full hour.
Adding “Edit:” is important for clarity when a post has been responded to, without that it’s just clutter.
That’s the issue.
I’m not convinced you’re capable of meaningful dialogue.
Take wealth distribution, on the one side we have the super and hyper-rich who live like kings, on the other we have the working poor who are one paycheck or bill away from bankruptcy and/or homelessness. Kings and serfs.