Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [138]
Recall that the State and its fiefdoms have no inherent interest in limiting its own reach, income and influence; rather, the State is ontologically constructed to seek a greater share of national income and ever greater influence and control--just like the private-sector Elites which partner with the State.
Put another way: there is no negative feedback to restrict the growth of the State except an engaged, skeptical citizenry who demand and enforces transparency and accountability. This will require new negative feedback loops and strengthening existing regulatory feedbacks that have been reduced to simulacra.
Thus no revolution is necessary; indeed, nothing illegal is required, either. Opting out is perfectly legal, as is constructing an alternative transparent, fully accountable economy and society which will prosper even as the financial Elites and the State collapse in insolvency.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Opaque parallel system of domination
Extreme concentration of power
Chapter Twenty: Insurmountable Barriers to Structural Reform
In a perfect world, both the citizenry and those grasping the reins of power would conclude that serious structural reform would serve their long-term interests better than structural collapse. Yet there are ontological (and therefore insurmountable) barriers to any such reform, obstacles which can perhaps best be understood as forces of nature similar to gravity: to expect any concentration of political and financial power to relinquish its power rather than defend it is akin to expecting gravity to cease its pull on mass.
Elites, by definition, hold concentrations of wealth and control at immensely higher power densities than the broad non-elite populace. I term this structural imbalance in power density asymmetric stakes in the game, in which the game is the concentration and distribution of national income and wealth, both via State-collected taxes and private capital.
To better understand the concept of power density, in which power is financial and political, let's compare a rural, agricultural economy such as the U.S. circa 1783 and a post-industrial urbanized economy such as the U.S. in 2009.
Setting aside the issue of slavery in 1783 America--from one point of view, a forced concentration of labor to serve the plantation model of production--we note the diffusion of power in the non-slave states. Voters--the ultimate source of political compliance and thus power--and private and public financial assets were diffused except for a few (by today's standards modest) urban centers: Philadelphia, Boston and New York. What Marx called "the means of production"--the capital, plant, tools and knowledge required to produce goods and services and thus wealth--were spread over the rural and urban populations alike.
Another way of describing this diffusion of power is to calculate the rate of concentration via the rate of inequality.
Thus a feudal society in which an Elite holds most of the wealth has a high rate of inequality, where a populace of free small landowners and tradespeople has a low level of inequality.
Non-slaveowning Colonial America had a low, stable rate of inequality, a condition which has plentiful academic documentation. According to Frank Ackerman's The Political Economy of Inequality, the top 1% of free adult males held 12% of the wealth in 1774 and 29% in 1860. The share of the top 10% rose from 49% in 1774 to 73% in 1860.
As the North industrialized and the Southern plantation-based economy consolidated, then wealth inequality increased between the Revolution and the Civil War. This concentration of wealth continued unabated through the Gilded Age up to 1929, when the Great Depression wrought vast increases in State powers as wealth was widely destroyed. The net result