The End of Liberalism as a political philosophy. - The Monarchists were right. The grand experiment has failed.

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

Maybe this entire paradigm of thinking - that if you just had the right system then everything else will fall into place regardless of how the people who both rule and live under your system act, is the real delusion here.

 

[William Murderface]

I would say the biggest problem is that the West can't quite decide which way to go with liberal thought. On the one hand, this idea of the individual is the basis of all and that we are all equal legally (nevermind the continually shrinking relevance of the nobility and even monarchies in Europe) and how this has led to the whole "one man, one vote" paradigm we know and love. On the other hand, I don't think there are too many people who can't look around and say that universal suffrage has worked out at all. We want to be fair, we want be just, we want everyone's voice heard, but then we are faced with this idea that we can have an individual who is a net payer of taxes and who studies the issues and who pays attention and who learns but his vote is balanced out by a crazy person or a net taker of taxes or someone who votes for Candidate A because he has better hair than Candidate B or who only votes this party or based on identity politics and so forth.

We should also face this idea that while we tend to think that governments are the hired help and are either accountable to the people (as is European thought) or are the people (the American ideal), what we have now are parties that do not care about the people and out of control bureaucracies that simply do what they want without restraint. This extends to the courts as well as some faceless drone in an government office. Worst of all is those people, from party kingmakers to bureaucratic bosses all seem to have an agenda that is at odds with what the people want. The sheer amount of immigration that has changed demographics so completely in the West since the 1960s being a prime example of that. No party ran on the idea of "we'll bring in the Third World by the millions", no party said "we fully intend to change the racial make up of this country" until it was too late, but it was done behind closed doors and what was said was couched in terms of things like fairness and equality, ideals everyone tends to want. The politicians had an agenda and the kept it hidden until they could no longer do so and by then the damage was done. Our own ideals of fairness were used against us. This is not a new thing. Again,, going back to universal suffrage and how we continually expanded just who was allowed to vote, regardless of qualification until those who should be voting are swamped by those who shouldn't.

It isn't just a question of immigration and voting. It is like that across the board on issues such as banking and land use and the environment and welfare and the military and education and Alphabet people and so on and so forth. We no longer even have a definition of what a right is. Is it a restriction on government that interferes with a free man's liberty as was the definition or is it an obligation for the government (and taxpayers) as those who think things like a right to healthcare seem to think? Even things like social standards like not wearing pajamas to the store have been largely excised from the public and anyone saying "please show some couth" are shouted down by the masses who immediately scream about racism or do what you want or some other such thing

What can be done about it? Monarchies don't work, tyrants stomp on our rights, unelected bureaucracies have no incentive to change, political parties will do what they want behind closed doors, universal suffrage has been a disaster but we will never be able to convince whole swaths of people to give up the franchise. Liberalism as a political ideal is a good thing, but how it has been implemented has been a total mistake, but how does one unring that bell and recover the main political ideal of the West?

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

How can rule of the Corporations, whether or not those corporations are held in common by their employees, lead to a fundamental possession of the land? I think this is the issue I am having here. There is a disconnect between possession of the land on which a people live, and the people who live on it. The current modern conceit is that the land is simply an asset, and the people are simply an input. Syndicalism doesn't just entertain this conceit, it is the very definition of it. Sure, it sounds good on paper to say that that "private" communes (corporations) can replace the functioning of the State itself, but I don't buy it.

Even today, you don't see the Swedes saying they salute the CEO's of Volvo and Ikea over the literal King of Sweden. Even though the King of Sweden is literally a stuffed marionet that gets trotted out on Christmas. If push came to shove, and the CEO of Volvo was handed a gun, and the King of Sweden was handed a gun, and all the Swedes got to vote on which Gun got the one bullet that would be used in a hypothetical duel to the death, would they vote for the CEO of Volvo to get the bullet, or the King? How would the CEO of Volvo's own Employees vote? Would a majority of that one demographic even vote for him?

There is something more here I think. Something way beyond just "aptitude" and "resources". If these were the only things we as a species cared about, there would be no more Kings at all. Yet their clearly are. Even in what could be argued to be the most progressive and "liberated" countries in the world.

The people assembled in different corporate bodies (based on their profession, so basically labor unions, or in some cases perhaps other personal affiliations) would indirectly (via an intermediary class like a union representative) select an able ruler for themselves who would rule for life and then be rightly guided by their subordinates both indirectly elected and appointed to pass on power to the next worthy candidate. Ergo you have a system representative of society as a whole and a binding symbol for the nation.

Regarding land, it isn't as important now because it hasn't just been about ownership of land for a very long time. Even in the Middle Ages, people had to sell their land to the rich because the rich became ever-better at rigging the system with lawsuits, access to the king, etc. This was especially a problem in Japan, where their system of land ownership concentrated almost all the land in the hands of elite courtiers and powerful religious institutions who became so disconnected from their land that after a few centuries they lost control to the people who actually managed that land (i.e. the samurai class).

In Europe (and Japan), their monarchies still exist largely out of a compromise between leftists and traditionalists. The leftists got their welfare state, the traditionalists kept an institution (and like everything else gets subverted to produce globohomo propaganda 24/7).

Yet the only alternatives that seem to be on offer are more perverted forms of liberalism. Fasicsm, Syndicalism or Socialism. The Liberal Democracies at least managed to square this circle by ingratiating the wealthy peasants into the system by creating a system where money=vote buying and patronage in the unelected beaurocracy. It doesn't so much solve the problem of Liberalism as it does incorporate it into an already corrupt system. Meaning the flaws in Liberal political theory get to run wild without any correction at all.

Socialism is just the inevitable consequence of liberalism, but national syndicalism and fascism are the correction of liberalism to account for the obvious flaws like the idea of the equality of men or trying to more closely correlate a wealthy and successful person with someone who actually deserves that (like not the Hunter Bidens of the world).

 

[mindlessobserver]

What can be done about it? Monarchies don't work, tyrants stomp on our rights, unelected bureaucracies have no incentive to change, political parties will do what they want behind closed doors, universal suffrage has been a disaster but we will never be able to convince whole swaths of people to give up the franchise. Liberalism as a political ideal is a good thing, but how it has been implemented has been a total mistake, but how does one unring that bell and recover the main political ideal of the West?

It could be argued a return to Monarchy or some sort of regression would be a way to unring that bell. Monarchism is inherently unstable if unchecked by mediating factors. kings always sit lightly on their thrones. I hate the idea of "intermediate" stages, because this smacks of the communists claiming the overbearing state is just "temporary" until true socialism is implemented.

In many respects though the bell is being unrung already. Overall faith in institutions is at a low tide all across the western world. Something is going to break eventually and what steps into that break will be what comes out on top. At this point though I am not seeing any valid alternatives that move things foreword. What alternatives there seem to be are pretty shit, from benevolent AI overlords (owned by Microsoft) to pure technocrats running everything behind the scenes while stuffed suits fight for the amusement of the idiot masses.

Even the people i charge of the Liberal Order today don't actually believe in any of its doctrine tenets. Especially when it comes to the administration of State power

 

[Anasûrimbor Kellhus]

A King or Queen, at the fundamental is "of the land". Their wealth comes from the land, and the people that live upon it. Liberal economists have agonized for years over the concept of the "Tragedy of the Commons", ignoring the fact that this "tragedy" was solved centuries ago when a King decided that a particularly nice patch of forest was his exclusive hunting reserve and ordered the unwashed peasants to kindly stop murdering all the deer. Which in a round about way preserved these animals to the present day. This idea of a King being "of the land" also means that despite the tendency towards despotism that is the nature of all humans, there is a "self interested" desire on the part of a King to not be overly abusive to the land and its people, since they are what provides his wealth and status. This is NOT the case with the leaders of a liberal State. A Liberal State is not bound to the land, it is bound to the ideas that underpin it, and these ideas are universal in nature. The people of their country are merely incidental tools in the grand vision. Be it the United States acting against its own self interest to "spread democracy", the Soviet Union establishing the Communist International to spread the global revolution, or the simple banality of formerly militant Irish Nationalist parties importing a hundred thousand Africans into the Irish countryside in order to fulfill the operating doctrine at the heart of their central conceit. That all men are created equal. A King would never do such a thing if put in his proper place, because a King understands that All Men are NOT equal. The men who support his throne are far more important then some random bunch of boat people coming in from Nigeria. It is also why without exception Liberal States will trend towards murderousness and despotism. This is being shown to be a universal truth, and the only difference between them is in how fast they go down the primrose path to hell.

Have you read Patriarcha by Robert Filmer? I have some friends convinced that Filmer was right and Locke was wrong and as I become more disillusioned with classical liberalism and whatever lolbert nonsense I believed a few years ago gonna be taking a read of it for myself.

also gigabrained OP and discussion

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

Well you're already further ahead than 95% of the masses, just by the fact that you spend time contemplating these things. Eventually (if you haven't already) you'll start to see that there isn't a solution, just due to the nature of humans.

Morally, we should all be anarchists. That doesn't necessarily make anarchy a workable solution unfortunately. But any system put in place will be used to abuse other people, and that is an inescapable fact.

The best we can hope for is hyper local rule, because the bigger the government, the bigger the abuse.

 

[PeachDream]

One thing that was touched on a bit but is very important: the rise of liberalism also coincides with an exponential increase in authoritarianism over the past few hundred years.

Authortarianism here just meaning what portion of people's income is taxed, what portion of people work for the government, what technologies does the government have to enforce laws, how many things are illegal or regulated, etc.

Ironically perhaps, I doubt an absolute monarch even  could effectivly manage a country like the modern US. Unelected employees for the federal government alone number almost 3 million, to say nothing of state and local governments. This is also why it's okay for our presidents to be geriatric dumbasses and things mostly keep on trucking. The bureaucracy has a mind of its own.

 

[Takayuki Yagami]

A very atheistic take. As we enter this brave new world of AI Generated moderation, always online voting machines, and homogenized cultural products, how much do you trust "the will of the people" in even an abstract sense to provide legitimacy? All sources of legitimacy are abstract and if you get down to it, bullshit. This I agree with. My point is that Popular Consent of the Governed is way more Bullshit then a higher power giving consent. God, whether he is real or fake, is beyond the established powers to control. The people on the other hand are right here and at hand just waiting to get squeezed and coddled in equal measure.

Hardly. Any fuckwit despot can claim authority from God. That doesn’t make it so.

 

[mindlessobserver]

One thing that was touched on a bit but is very important: the rise of liberalism also coincides with an exponential increase in authoritarianism over the past few hundred years.

Should probably be pointed out more. One of the core concepts of Liberalism is the individual rights. But John Locke then codified the idea of a "social-contract", which Voltaire and Rousseau ran with. This led to the idea of the State not being a possession of any one man (a King) but instead a possession of ALL held in common, with appointed managers who administer the state on behalf of the sovereign will of the people.

I have a major problem with this because it deifies the State itself, rather then the man. A God King at his fundamental point is just a man.

Hardly. Any fuckwit despot can claim authority from God. That doesn’t make it so.

Correct. But Liberalism does not dispense with the notion of divinely inspired government. It simply replaces a King with the Beaurocracy of Government (Its legislatures, courts, executives, ministries, departments and so on) and the Divine Mandate with "The Collective Will", where all the people running the apparatus of this new divine State do so ostensibly as "Civil Servants" to the people. Under a Monarchy functioning properly, all managers of the State serve on behalf of the King, and at his pleasure. From the greatest Minister, to the lowliest beat cop. Under a Liberal Democracy, The Ministers down to the lowliest clerk serve "the people" who as I have argued previously are piss poor masters of those given petty little government fiefdoms.

Nothing has functionally changed in the understanding of how a Government works. what has instead happened is the authority has been disbursed out of the hands of one man and into the hands of a select technocratic few. Who operate not in their own names, but in the name of the State itself. When you are commanded to go before the court in the United States because you caught a traffic citation, its never "Officer Fuckwit of the Bumfuck Nowhere Police Department v. You". Its "The State v. You". This is Liberalism operating as intended. While Humans are just as foible and corrupt as they have always been, Liberalism now provides them a shield. They have their power because it was legitimately given to them "by the people". Thus everything, EVERYTHING they do is justified.

A King has no such excuse. He is also just one man. If he fails, the fingers will be pointed at him. When the law is imposed, its not because some retarded podunk Cop is hiding behind the mask of State authority. It is done in the Kings name. A single man, on who all responsibility for the functioning of the State must rest. Liberalism trends towards murderous despotism for this reason. A King must sit lightly on his throne and knows that his authority only comes from his own moral conscious balanced against the need to provide a properly functioning State. Liberal apparatchiks have no need for a morality at all, as their legitimacy is already foreordained. If they were unfit for the roles they serve, then they would not be serving them in the first place. More importantly, anyone who OPPOSES them is not some revolutionary out for good cause. They are an insurrectionist against the divine State.

In essence we have gone full circle back to the early enlightenment age where there is now this assumption that dissent against an "elected" government is not just unnatural, its a moral sin. Something that must be punished with the most extreme measures available to the State. The worst part about it is the leaders in these Liberal governments honestly believe this, because it lies at the fundamental core of Liberal philosophy. Their power is derived from the people. Thus they have power. Those who oppose them are not people.

Ironically perhaps, I doubt an absolute monarch even  could effectivly manage a country like the modern US. Unelected employees for the federal government alone number almost 3 million, to say nothing of state and local governments. This is also why it's okay for our presidents to be geriatric dumbasses and things mostly keep on trucking. The bureaucracy has a mind of its own.

Which is why my ideal "hybrid system" that is coming into mind is a sort of Feudal Federalism. Democracy and popular will definitely can work. At a local and granular level. In a small town of 2,000 people you can quite happily hold town council elections, and vote on whether or not to raise taxes 2% every year for 5 years to pay for a new fire truck.

This system breaks down at a national level, and REALLY breaks down in a country the size of the USA. But one of the good elements of Liberalism has been its ability to create highly functioning industrial States that work at Scale. The problem is these states inevitably become nightmarishly authoritarian hellscapes, because the only way to manage a large and fractious population is to apply the boot. For all the best of intentions of course.

The Confederate States of America, slavery issue aside, made this their primary argument in the US Civil War. The Federal Government was becoming an all consuming monster that threatened the way of life of the people far from its metropole, and sought to impose an order Alien to them without their consent. Solely because the great cities of New York and Chicago with their attending environs outnumbered the Southern voters by a marginal quantity.

 

[William Murderface]

The flaw in that thinking is that at the town sized government there can be just as much corruption and bureaucracy as there is at the national level, only it ends up being more nefarious because it is more personal. It's the people I live with and see every day versus some nameless faceless clerk in a office in some government building who will forget I ever existed ten seconds after I leave the office. And at the local level there are, in some ways, more avenues for abuse because it is personal.

Let's say I need a building permit to add on to my house. The clerk at city hall I went to school with and I was banging the girl he had a crush on in High School. He never quite got over it and holds a grudge to this day. He can find ways to not issue me the permit or make it that much more of a hassle or more expensive. Or the mayor will approve my request for a price. I see him in church every Sunday and my resentment just builds. Or the police set up speedtraps and only target people just passing through. That's the kind of stuff that led to Heemeyer and Killdozer.

I'm not sure there is a happy medium, but I do know the extremes of anarchy or authoritarianism don't work for their own reasons. Federalism has clearly been abused and stretched to the point that the states are little more than provincial divisions and all the real power is in DC instead of each state doing its own thing and DC acting as an agent to coordinate efforts as needed. Maybe the Federalism concept would work in a nation the size of one of the European countries, but then again, maybe not. I just don't see how anything like classic liberalism can exist with massive governments ruling millions of people who don't have a single ethnic or cultural identity. You can't import the Third World by the millions and expect them to nurture the love of liberty when the people born and raised in the West no longer are taught to appreciate it much less fight for it tooth and nail.

 

[PeachDream]

This system breaks down at a national level, and REALLY breaks down in a country the size of the USA. But one of the good elements of Liberalism has been its ability to create highly functioning industrial States that work at Scale.

The question then to me becomes 'Is creating one massive and standardized industrial society really worth it?'
Men are meant to use 'technology' to help them accomplish tasks, it's what makes them human.
But maintaining a certain level of local autarky, of understanding the true simplicity of man's needs and ensuring these are produced locally by your peers seems the only real antidote to massive authoritarianism.
An ideal society would probably have to sacrifice some technologies that were made by capitalists for capitalism, but may eventually find more decentralization friendly technologies to pick up some of the slack.

Which is why my ideal "hybrid system" that is coming into mind is a sort of Feudal Federalism.

Not sure if this is exactly what you're suggesting, but ideally I'd think people would be together in towns/communes/families/whatever around the Dunbar number and would ensure the majority of their day-to-day needs are sourced locally. Religious morality along with land and blood ties make anarcho-communism psychologically feasible within this small unit. Solutions to larger problems like ecological preservation, common military defense, and the trade of non-survival goods could then be voluntarily coordinated at a larger level possibly with a (fiat) currency exchanged between communes. Because the proletariat* has been eliminated as a class people would never need to compromise ideologically just to keep their jobs, though they can still work jobs if their family has extra time/people on their hands. Such communes would band together to make a court system, but respecting the principle of subsidiarity they would only handle conflicts between communes, with the internal running of communes left entirely up to their own participants.

*People who must sell their labor to a superior to ensure the means of their own survival, you can have a job and not be a prole

The flaw in that thinking is that at the town sized government there can be just as much corruption and bureaucracy as there is at the national level, only it ends up being more nefarious because it is more personal. It's the people I live with and see every day versus some nameless faceless clerk in a office in some government building who will forget I ever existed ten seconds after I leave the office. And at the local level there are, in some ways, more avenues for abuse because it is personal.

(edit cause you posted while I was writing and its very relevant)

You are correct, but I wonder if that's not a symptom of our current society.
People are very atomized and no longer used to depending on each other in an organic way, Take a look at Durkheim's organic/mechanical dichotomy. (Personally the labels should be reversed but w/e)
I think being able to work with people is a skill that can atrophy if not used like a muscle.
Humans obviously evolved to be a social species that can work together in moderately sized groups, they just need experience needing to do so, a common moral framework, and possibly blood ties.

 

[William Murderface]

You are correct, but I wonder if that's not a symptom of our current society.

I'm sure social pressures are a factor in keeping corruption and powermongering in check, especially if being exposed means losing everything up to a life, but I also suspect that people being people there have always been some kind of petty dictator types at the local city hall or someone who would agree to look the other way for a price or a tribal chief who coveted something some tribesman had and found some way to end up with it.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Not sure if this is exactly what you're suggesting, but ideally I'd think people would be together in towns/communes/families/whatever around the Dunbar number and would ensure the majority of their day-to-day needs are sourced locally. Religious morality along with land and blood ties make anarcho-communism psychologically feasible within this small unit. Solutions to larger problems like ecological preservation, common military defense, and the trade of non-survival goods could then be voluntarily coordinated at a larger level possibly with a (fiat) currency exchanged between communes. Because the proletariat* has been eliminated as a class people would never need to compromise ideologically just to keep their jobs, though they can still work jobs if their family has extra time/people on their hands. Such communes would band together to make a court system, but respecting the principle of subsidiarity they would only handle conflicts between communes, with the internal running of communes left entirely up to their own participants.

Yes and No. Capitalism as a system I don't think is necessarily tied to Liberalism. Capitalism in many respects is simply a codification of what all societies fundamentally understood. That a man is entitled to the efforts of his labor.

Watch "Tasting Histories" latest episode on making the Bread of Ramses.

One of the things I found fascinating about this was that the Kings of Egypt very clearly derived their prestige and power from their ability to insure that their ministers and workers were well paid. And that if they were NOT paid, they told the supposed God King to fuck off. Politely to be sure. But fuck off nonetheless. Even in the early Bronze Age there was an understanding that the purpose of Government was not to serve some divine mission. It was to insure that everyone got paid well for the jobs they did, and that nobody starved for arbitrary reasons. Capitalism in a nut shell Even cooler, the depictions of the daily lives of citizens in this society was strangely...similar to what we experience today. The importance of taking care of the family unit. Fathers telling their sons to not abandon mom, because she quite literally cleaned your shit off your ass for three fucking years and was there for you with snacks after school.

Ancient Egypt really had things figured out.

The problem with anarcho-communism is that it is too fractive. Your small commune may be able to pay for a new Fire Truck. But can it pay for 1,000 Abrams Main Battle Tanks to throw back an invading horde of Chinese insect people intent on taking all your shit for the glorious revolution?

No.

In this respect the King must serve, as the sovereign over all the loyal participants of his domain. Thus, like in Egypt, the Farms and Villages send a tithe to the Kings Granary. The King uses this tithe to pay his Army, and his ministers, and then to set aside. So in times of famine the people can be provided aid, and in times of war the people can be defended. Incidentally, this is a system that lasted for almost 3,000 years, so it is inarguably the most stable government form ever invented by humanity bar none. Not even the Chinese were able to match the Egyptian Dynasties. Local "communes" if you will, ruled by a divine God King. Who had an odd habit of getting tossed in the river when he misruled terribly.

 

[PeachDream]

Capitalism in many respects is simply a codification of what all societies fundamentally understood. That a man is entitled to the efforts of his labor.

This definition might work if we were contrasting it with total communism, but modern Capitalism is more than merely the presence of currency and some notion of ownership. Capitalism assumes a government monopoly on the issuance of currency and property titles and by extension the issuance of a lot of more contrived forms of capital like intellectual property rights, permits, bonds, etc. Money has existed throughout human history but even charging a bit of interest on a loan was considered immoral to most of Christendom until like 300 years ago. Imagine explaining quantitive easing, credit default swaps, or the auction of a part of the electromagnetic spectrum to some medieval peasant.

But can it pay for 1,000 Abrams Main Battle Tanks to throw back an invading horde of Chinese insect people intent on taking all your shit for the glorious revolution?

I mean states have only been able to do this for about 200 years. Even the concept of a standing army has been come and go throughout human history, even though the first states arose 5000 years ago.
Anarchism would just struggle with the same problem Statism has had a few millennia to figure out: how to define who's on 'our' side, organize them into larger functional units, and get those people to all contribute greatly to a cause that has only a probabilistic effect on their lives

 

[William Murderface]

I don't think liberalism and capitalism are tied together at all except in the broadest scope. At it's base capitalism is, as mindlessobserver notes above, the idea that a man is entitled to the fruits of his labor, or more broadly, everyone from a business owner to the lowliest worker does what is in his or her best economic interest. Even chattel slaves could work and keep money from a second job when they weren't "on the clock" so to speak. The problem came when you started having corporations and lobbyists who pushed for legislatures to make the laws so that they were the ones with all the advantages and power. The pushback from the likes of Marx and Lenin came because normal people were sick of being used and abused by the nobility and later the money men like Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan. Or, as an economics professor once said to a class, "happy employees don't form unions."

Liberalism is really the flip side of that coin of freedom, just on the personal instead of economic interest where a man can say what he wants, think his own thoughts, worship as he see fits, without restriction (so long as he doesn't harm someone in the process) and government is restrained and kept to a bare minimum. Much like capitalism and corporations, the relationship between the individual and his rights and the power of the state have shifted so much that the words are still there, but they really have no meaning.

Now, I am not advocating anarchy or communism or anything of the sort. But I do think it helps to at least acknowledge that while capitalism is the best economic ideal we have, it was easily warped into the monstrosity we have now in its place, just like how the role of the state has ballooned to the point that it has become the end all-be all of human existence, especially since it is in bed with the hypercorporations out there.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Now, I am not advocating anarchy or communism or anything of the sort. But I do think it helps to at least acknowledge that while capitalism is the best economic ideal we have, it was easily warped into the monstrosity we have now in its place, just like how the role of the state has ballooned to the point that it has become the end all-be all of human existence, especially since it is in bed with the hypercorporations out there.

A major reason it was warped is because the very idea of a corporation is a holdover of Monarchy, not Liberalism. Corporations were quasi patents of nobility that the King gave to people to work as common agents in his name. Famous examples being "The Virginia Company" or the "East India Company". The Caveat of course being that the corporation acted according to the will of the King and paid the appropriate bribe...I mean tithe.

Corporations survived the liberal revolutions by very adeptly hiding in Contract Law, and in the modern context, asserting personal sovereignty like any other citizen. Where before their very existence was at the pleasure of the King, who could end them at his leisure, now they were protected. They had rights. They could enter into contracts with other citizens, could have speech, could even petition on their own behalf for redress of grievance!

None of which would have happened in a Monarchy, or in fact did. When a corporation got too Uppity the King simply revoked their charter. And since their Charter was given solely at the Kings Leisure, at the Leisure of the King he could end them. The very concept of a corporation as a person being recognized by Liberal Democracies is perhaps the greatest joke history has ever played on mankind, and goes a long way to explaining why modern economies are so fucked up. You have a literal monarchical institution that was given inordinate power on the assumption there was a superior above them who could end their existence for any or no reason at all, that are now considered people. Hilarious.

To be expected though. Liberalism favors the merchant class due to its need to derive authority from the people. And whoever has money, can get the people in short order.

 

[Ser Prize]

I'm sure social pressures are a factor in keeping corruption and powermongering in check, especially if being exposed means losing everything up to a life, but I also suspect that people being people there have always been some kind of petty dictator types at the local city hall or someone who would agree to look the other way for a price or a tribal chief who coveted something some tribesman had and found some way to end up with it.

I think your dickhead at the permit office scenario could be solved if we all agreed to re-institute dueling to the death and the culture around it.

I lean very Hobbes. People are most respectful of you when you have the ability to negatively impact them. So the petty tyrant either has to duel or get shamed for being a huge pussy.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

One thing that was touched on a bit but is very important: the rise of liberalism also coincides with an exponential increase in authoritarianism over the past few hundred years.

Authortarianism here just meaning what portion of people's income is taxed, what portion of people work for the government, what technologies does the government have to enforce laws, how many things are illegal or regulated, etc.

Ironically perhaps, I doubt an absolute monarch even  could effectivly manage a country like the modern US. Unelected employees for the federal government alone number almost 3 million, to say nothing of state and local governments. This is also why it's okay for our presidents to be geriatric dumbasses and things mostly keep on trucking. The bureaucracy has a mind of its own.

Even by that definition of authoritarianism, that's not really true (minus the technology thing). Look at the Inca Empire, a command economy whose core unit of currency was demanding labor from communities managed by government bureaucrats. Practically everyone in the Inca Empire worked for the state at some point. And that wasn't unusual, since that's a classic "palace economy" like most of the Bronze Age world. Many states had enormous codes of law like China where it could take a room full of the top scholars decades to actually compile and decide the laws since they worked on so many precedents, and that's to say nothing about Islamic law and all its regulations, or times when Islamic law is layered over some tribal law code like in Somalia. Taxation? Nah, tax rates have been higher in the past than today, the only difference is that the people back then usually rose up and killed some politicians when they weren't getting anything useful in return.

An enormous bureaucracy was the Chinese ideal for the entirety of history, and the Chinese Emperor was indeed an absolute monarch. It's part of why the Chinese supported morality and righteous conduct among their officials, because they knew that some of them would be corrupt and misuse their office and there would be nothing the central government could do about it, so the idea was to reduce that number of corrupt people. But there was theoretically nothing stopping the Emperor or one of his chief ministers from interfering in the career for good or ill of even the lowliest bureaucrat.

I think an absolute monarchy in this day and age could work (even if it wouldn't be ideal), it just would look very little like the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe or whatever silliness OP is going for since feudalism has long been rendered obsolete. Land ownership simply isn't the main form of economic activity and hasn't been for almost two centuries now, even when you ignore the fake GDP boosting "line go up" Wall Street bullshit that personifies a modern economy.

One of the things I found fascinating about this was that the Kings of Egypt very clearly derived their prestige and power from their ability to insure that their ministers and workers were well paid. And that if they were NOT paid, they told the supposed God King to fuck off. Politely to be sure. But fuck off nonetheless. Even in the early Bronze Age there was an understanding that the purpose of Government was not to serve some divine mission. It was to insure that everyone got paid well for the jobs they did, and that nobody starved for arbitrary reasons. Capitalism in a nut shell Even cooler, the depictions of the daily lives of citizens in this society was strangely...similar to what we experience today. The importance of taking care of the family unit. Fathers telling their sons to not abandon mom, because she quite literally cleaned your shit off your ass for three fucking years and was there for you with snacks after school.

Ancient Egypt really had things figured out.
[...]

In this respect the King must serve, as the sovereign over all the loyal participants of his domain. Thus, like in Egypt, the Farms and Villages send a tithe to the Kings Granary. The King uses this tithe to pay his Army, and his ministers, and then to set aside. So in times of famine the people can be provided aid, and in times of war the people can be defended. Incidentally, this is a system that lasted for almost 3,000 years, so it is inarguably the most stable government form ever invented by humanity bar none. Not even the Chinese were able to match the Egyptian Dynasties. Local "communes" if you will, ruled by a divine God King. Who had an odd habit of getting tossed in the river when he misruled terribly.

Ancient Egypt was most certainly not capitalism. It was a command economy where the king and his ministers decided who gets what, and with all sorts of price fixing going on (since it was a barter economy with no coins), and that included paying workers a salary. If the king didn't give them what they wanted, he made himelf vulnerable to usurpation by some noble who actually was redistributing income and doing his job for him, as happened many times.

Hell, I wouldn't even call Ancient Egypt particularly stable. They went through something like 20+ indigenous dynasties and then some foreign dynasties like the Hyksos, a Berber dynasty, and even a dynasty of literal kangz from Kush before they were conquered for good by the Persians. Part of it was by choice, since early Egypt didn't concern itself with expanding beyond the Nile and thus entangle itself in foreign affairs, part of it was geography since there's nothing west of Egypt in that era and the Sinai is a really shitty desert and east of there are all the poor-ass Semite tribes the Jews genocided. Who'd want to conquer Egypt instead of just trade with them? Egypt's economic system too shifted over the millennia, even if it always remained more or less a command economy.

A major reason it was warped is because the very idea of a corporation is a holdover of Monarchy, not Liberalism. Corporations were quasi patents of nobility that the King gave to people to work as common agents in his name. Famous examples being "The Virginia Company" or the "East India Company". The Caveat of course being that the corporation acted according to the will of the King and paid the appropriate bribe...I mean tithe.

Nope, modern corporations originated from a medieval reinterpretation of a very similar concept from Ancient Rome. In any case, the classic early modern example was the Dutch East India Company which originated from the Dutch Republic. They have no inherent connection with monarchy.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

@mindlessobserver
@Save the Loli

What I know about the corporation is that its Western form (they had a version in the Orient, but I have no familiarity with it) originates from the Romans and rests on the concept of legal personhood. That is, a group (or "body," as we may say) a people may, through some kind of collective enterprise, form, in their collectivity, an identity that transcends the individual and is a legal body unto itself. Body, corpse, corporeal form, corpus, corporation. There's a common root.

Why did the Romans develop this? Well, any culture that has become advanced enough to develop the state has to deal with the issue of how to manage the separate identity of the ruler from that of the state they rule. This pressure isn't equal on all societies, though, nor will they necessarily develop the same solution. In monarchies it's not that big of a deal, because the monarchy is usually inherited and can be, in some sense, thought of as the property of the ruler. That's not exactly correct, you have issues like religious legitimacy, consent of the aristocracy and so on, but in some loose ways this work. The king dies, his assets and liabilities go to his successor.

In a democratic or republican society this doesn't work. Your head of state/government can and will change frequently, change between lineages, and change during the lifetime of the ruler, to the point that the assets and liabilities of the ruler MUST be legally separated from the assets and liabilities of the public. The government is not private property in republican society.

How did cultures like Athens and Carthage manage this? I have no fucking clue. But in Rome they invent the corporation and then they start to use it for all kinds of different things, both political offices/government agencies, religious institutions, mutual aid societies, and other such things. All things that would also technically be corporations today - city/state/federal governments have legal personhood, you can sue them, they can own property and so on - but there was no common business corporation as such, nor any concept of joint stock.

After the Roman Empire fell, the Christian portion of it preserved the corporate concept while the Islamic portion did not. The reasons are long and complicated (Kuran's Long Divergence studies it), but the short of it was that the Christians had a perfectly good body of law to use, whereas the Muslims implemented their own alien legal code (Sharia) and it was not amenable to internal reform. (Kuran argues that this is one of the big reasons the Muslims, master navigators, failed to become successful overseas colonizers). The corporate concept was useful to the Catholics for their own Church, monasteries, monastic orders, guilds, city charters, and other such things. In this time you first start seeing corporate-like structures being used for business (monasteries as cooperative firms, Templars as international bankers, etc.), but private profit is not the rationale.

Finally, the business corporation emerges in its modern form as a result of global trade. Before the Age of Exploration there is no reason to form a business corporation because there is no industry where economies of scale are so large that a private individual couldn't reasonably run the business themselves. International trade, colonization and conquest are all extremely risk, however, and so while individuals COULD gamble their livelihoods on private ship ownership - many did - it was far more safe for many people to pool their money to start a very large firm where losses (catastrophic to a small owner) would be offset by successes. Since they're mobilizing massive numbers of people to fund them, they invent joint stock ownership as a way to simplify the governance/negotiating process.

In those days a corporate charter was still a privilege the ruler had to award, and so these corporations were always pitched as serving some sort of public good. This was easy, because the profit-seeking always went hand-in-hand with expanding the empire. The conquistadors funded their operations like a type of venture capital, not exactly corporate but still issuing shares to merchants to buy their equipment, and effectively opening "franchises" (so to speak) of the Spanish Empire. The early British North America colonies did the same (Virginia and New England), but they tended to lose their corporate status quickly. And the great company-states - British and Dutch East India Companies most notably, but Hudson Bay and Dutch West India also stand out - acting as, effectively, private governments that were vassals of larger public empires.

The state also worked with the merchant class to develop large banking corporations as a way to consolidate financial resources, make one big lender that could be the king's moneylender on a much grander scale. In the United States this was done too with the various state and federal banks, and from that you get the concept of the central bank long before monetary policy was ever developed.


Anyways, you all probably know a lot more details to flesh that out. Short of it, I guess, is you're both right. It's a republican institution in origin, that is itself republican in concept (shareholders will vote for representatives to manage the enterprise on their behalf), but its revival and its marriage to capitalism came about because corporations and colonial empires were a match made in heaven.

 

[mindlessobserver]

How did cultures like Athens and Carthage manage this? I have no fucking clue. But in Rome they invent the corporation and then they start to use it for all kinds of different things, both political offices/government agencies, religious institutions, mutual aid societies, and other such things. All things that would also technically be corporations today - city/state/federal governments have legal personhood, you can sue them, they can own property and so on - but there was no common business corporation as such, nor any concept of joint stock.

The classical corporations were not really corporations as we understand them. It would be far more accurate to think of them as an extension of a powerful persons household. For example, the term "Fire Sale" originates from the practice of Marcus Crassus, a roman Aristocrat, who employed slaves of his household to put out fires. Basically, when a fire broke out in the city, Crassus and his "company" (of slaves) would show up. Crassus would offer to buy the burning building. At a steep, STEEP discount. The owner would of course agree. Then Crassuses slaves would put out the fire, and Crassus owned the property.

The Slaves worked "in the name of their master". For his own enrichment. Which meant they had no individual rights of their own. They were not "people". They were slaves. Which means they had no rights, agency, or even IDENTITY under the law. Everything they did, was at the will of the master. In this case Crassus. Which means that anything they did wrong was not their fault. It was Crassus'. The concept of corporate personhood is derived ultimately from the concept of classical slavery. The workers that serve the master are just that. Servants, of the master. They do everything in his name, and as such the master is responsible for their training, their discipline, and their actions. If the master is shown to have properly trained and disciplined his slaves according to the standards of the time, then a slave acting rowdy could be overlooked. There was an understanding slaves can become rebellious. But if a master was derelict in his duties. If he failed to train and discipline his slaves, then their actions were a reflection on him.

This is the core foundation of Corporate Law. Both in Common Law, and Continental Law. A Corporate worker is not a person. He is a Servant of the Master.

Now, you may be sitting here looking at what I am putting down and thinking "I get it. I can pick up what you are putting down". No my friends. You cannot.

Because I must break the conditioning. You mistakenly assume I think its wrong that the corporate wage cagie peons are servants of the master. No. That is their proper place. They swore obedience to the master, they take the masters pay, and they do his bidding. That is their proper place. One they of free will took upon themselves.

The corruption of Liberal Democracy, in the hands of the Merchant Class, that has been applied to this system is that they have also abrogated responsibility to the MASTER, in HIS PERSON in favor of some ephemeral construct of law. You see, when the Master was derelict, the Master was PERSONALLY held to account. And in the case of one of his slaves murdering someone, he could potentially have been executed in ancient times. Now however, if a Corporation literally kills people because its peons were derelict, is there a threat of the CEO, Owner, or Board of Directors being put on death row? Of course not. They hide behind "the corporate shield". And if that shield breaks, they simply declare bankruptcy. Sackler Pharmaceuticals is potentially responsible for MILLIONS of dead in the USA due to the abuse of opioids. Have they been held to account? No. They paid a pittance, dissolved the company and faded into the background.

That is what I am putting on the ground. Now pick it up.