However, even apart from this, as soon as a protection monopoly exists, for any given sized territory, the monopolist will try to intensify his exploitation and increase his income and wealth at the expense of the protected subjects to the maximum extent possible. As long as the monopoly is held by a single person, like a prince or a king, and especially when it is a hereditary monopoly, then it is in the monopolist’s interest, because he owns the monopoly and the capital value of it, to preserve the value of his property. He will exploit little today in order to exploit more tomorrow.
Popular resistance against expansion of State power will be very high if there is a single person in charge because there is obviously no free entry into the State apparatus, and the benefits of the monopoly accrue to a single man and his extended family—that is, the hereditary nobility. Accordingly, the public resentment and vigilance is heightened, and attempts to intensify exploitation find quick and severe limitations. People hated the king because they realized that “he is the ruler and we are ruled by him.”
Predictably, a great push forward in the State’s desire for intensified exploitation occurred only in conjunction with the reform of the State—drawn out over centuries—from a princely to a democratic State. Under modern majoritarian democracy—that is, the type of State that came into full bloom after World War I on a world wide scale—the monopoly and exploitation do not disappear. Majoritarian democracy is not a system of self-rule and self-defense. State and people are not one and the same thing. With the substitution of an elected parliament and presidents for an unelected prince or king, protection remains as much a monopoly as it was before. What happens is only this: the territorial protection monopoly becomes now public rather than private property. Instead of a prince who regards it as his private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in charge of the protection racket. The caretaker does not own the protection racket. Instead, he is just allowed to use the current resources for his own advantage. He owns usufruct but he does not own the capital value. This does not eliminate the self-interest driven tendency toward increased exploitation. To the contrary, it only makes exploitation less rational and less calculating, and more shortsighted and more wasteful.
Moreover, because entry into a democratic government is open—everyone can become president—resistance against State property invasions is reduced. This leads to the same result: increasingly under democratic conditions, the worst will rise to the top of the State in free competition. Competition is not always good. Competition in the field of becoming the shrewdest aggressor against private property is nothing to be greeted. And this is precisely what democracy amounts to.
Princes and kings were dilettantes as rulers, and normally had a good measure of natural elite upbringing and value system so as to act often enough simply as a good household father would have done. Democratic politicians on the other hand, are and must be professional demagogues, constantly appealing to even the basest—and that is typically egalitarian instincts—as every vote is obviously as good as any other. And because publicly elected politicians are never held personally accountable for official public service, they are far more dangerous, from the viewpoint of those who want their property to be protected and want security, than any king has ever been.
If you combine these two tendencies that I mentioned, inherent in a State: intensification—exploiting the domestic population, and extensification; then you get a one-world democracy, with a one-world paper currency issued by a world central bank.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your Comments