Muddling Back to
Monarchy
Introduction
There is a dynamic tension between monarchy and
democracy, between a system of privilege that rules its subjects and a
system of equality that serves its citizens. The purpose of this book
is to examine that tension and to show how and why we have been slowly
sliding back to monarchy, both politically and economically.
The bad news is this slide back to monarchy began as soon as
independence was won from Britain. Indeed, the seeds of a return to
monarchy were sewn even before the American Revolution was over. The
good news is that the causes of this slide can be traced to a small
number of fundamental errors - errors that can be corrected by very
simple reforms.
Americans have recognized the need for these reforms and
conducted heroic campaigns for their implementation, only to be
distracted by propaganda from both the left and the right. We will
examine the essential contrasts between monarchy and privilege on
one hand and democracy and equality on the other. We will also examine
how beneficiaries of privilege have manipulated the left and right to
prevent genuine reform, and the superstitions of left and right that
prevent that reform today.
We will start with a history of privilege, for privilege lies at the
root of monarchy. We will also look at the cost of privilege to
ordinary people, and at how the growth of privilege brings about the
decline of general freedom and prosperity. We will not only examine the
American experience, but will sketch a general history of man.
The way we were, not long ago
I grew up in the 1950s - hardly an era of free
expression. The first Great Depression and the second Great War had
traumatized my parents' generation into a rigid social conformity. Fear
of another global war focused on the territorial conquests of Soviet
Russia and the communist takeover of China, punctuated by the Korean
War.
Yet a joyful, hopeful economic outlook prevailed. The number of people
unemployed during a typical week was lower than the number on vacation.
One parent's income was usually enough to raise a family. Even
unskilled, minimum-wage employees were far more at ease than they are
today.
The rise of the automobile enabled ordinary working people to escape
the high cost of city living by moving to cheap farmland that had been
converted into suburbs. In 1950, the median house cost ($7,354)
was only 2.2 times as high as the median family income ($3,319). A mere forty years later, the median house price of $119,600 had risen to 3.4 times the median family income of $35,353.
Mortgages in 1950 were typically for 10-20 years, and they are now more
typically forty and even fifty years long. Second mortgages were rare,
and "reverse mortgages" were extremely rare. Low-cost
housing, minimal debt and full employment meant more discretionary
spending, and more discretionary spending meant more jobs.
These statistics actually understate escalating cost of housing compared
to the earnings of labor, because these income statistics report gross
(pre-tax) incomes of families, not net incomes of individuals. Sales
and income taxes had become much higher by 1990, and the number of
households with more than one wage earner had greatly increased. Modern
Americans have also the added family expenses of professional child
care, multiple vehicles for commuting to work, increased reliance on
restaurants and pre-packaged foods, etc. Mere income and housing price
statistics badly understate how quickly the "American Dream" has been
slipping away.
Americans
who left the city for the suburbs enjoyed the same sense of success as
their ancestors who had left Europe, where rents were high and wages
were low, for America where rents were low and wages were high. We took
great pride in America's legacy as a the country that had
led Europeans to abandon monarchies in favor of democracy, and the
country that had more
recently rescued Europe from Nazi despotism. A steady stream of war
movies romanticized our contribution to the war, and a steady stream of
Westerns romanticized our pioneer heritage as a free, independent
people settling wide-open
spaces without interference from the grasping feudal lords who
dominated the "old country."
Suburban homes were mostly purchased by young couples raising a "baby
boom" of optimistic, financially comfortable children like myself. It was the birth of
television culture, where a stream of programs taught
us American values. Superman fought for "Truth, Justice
and the American Way," three terms that were treated as synonyms.
Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry, Roy Rodgers, Wild Bill Hickok, The Lone
Ranger, The Cisco Kid, Matt Dillon and many others championed those
values in the context of our pioneer heritage. Some villains of movie and TV westerns were ordinary
ne'er-do-wells, but many were land grabbers of one sort or
another - claim jumpers, ranchers fighting farmers, upstream barons
damming up water supplies, speculators with inside information on
proposed railroads, people provoking Indian wars because they want
Indian land, etc.
Although most of us had little more
than a vague sense of history, land issues had actually been central to
the settling of the West. The connection between freedom and access to
affordable land is uniquely American (and Australian). Indeed, the main
reason Europeans came here is that the land of Europe had been
monopolized by feudal lords for centuries. A few societies, such as
Ireland and some of the Scandinavian countries, had resisted the rise
of feudalism until relatively recently. Others saw the democratic
institutions of Common Law quickly eroded. Still others, where the
Roman Empire, had been replaced almost overnight by the Holy Roman
Empire, have no memory of freedom at all.
The American memory of freedom and its relationship to affordable land,
(and a relative absence of debt) is not nearly so distant. Yet it is
slipping away as those on both sides of the political spectrum
studiously avoid confronting it. With all the right-wing opposition to
taxes and the left-wing fixation on services, very few have paid
attention to the real causes of inflated real estate taxes and the
explosion of personal, corporate and governemnt debt as a whole.
America's original progressives had tackled land monopoly and
debt-money head-on, proposing fundamental, privilege-ending reforms.
This had a genuinely positive effect on the well-bing of ordinary
citizens. Since, then, however, that left has been largely replaced by
a more bureaucratic, paternalistic left. The paternalistic left avoids
confronting privilege and instead asks for tax-funded programs to treat
the symptoms of privilege.
This has turned the programs of the left into perfect scapegoats for
the monopolistic right. The American middle class believes it is
endangered, not because banks have been lending us money they had
created out of thin air, and not because land speculators have been
driving up the prices of land and natural resources, but because of
these bureaucratic programs.
And indeed, many government programs have often made problems worse.
For example, mortgage subsidies and homeowner tax breaks camealmost
entirely from increased taxes on renters and small businesses, and have
merely accelerated housing price increases. Like a dog chasing its own
tail, our government leaders come up with more and more tax-funded
programs to help taxpayers cope with ever-increasing land prices and
ever-deepening indebtedness. This happens because the left avoids
confronting privilege while the right actively defends privilege. Once
the public demands that the left set aside its bureaucratic paternalism
and the right set aside its alliance with banking, real estate and
licensed monopolies, real progress will once again be made and the
lives of ordinary Americans will once again improve.
There must be a major political realignment against privilege pure and
simple. There have been many such realignments in our history, as later
chapters will show. The real trick is not creating such a realignment,
but in preventing a reversion to the current alignment of
paternalistic bureaucrats vs. monopolistic plutocrats. The underlying
problem is that when those who crave freedom actually get that freedom,
they turn away from political intrigue and set about to enjoy that
freedom. In contrast, those who crave bureaucratic power and
monopolistic privilege constantly work to develop those powers and
privileges.
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