Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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That, of course, is ultimately extremely defeatist compared to the ideals that the USA claims (the practice and history, on the other hand, would be another discussion).

One of the things the right wing (especially the religious right) in the US does far better than any other groups is to claim lofty egalitarian or noble-minded principals while not applying them to themselves.

But if we throw that out, and want to embrace the cynicism, why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?

After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.

EDIT: there's a good tie-in there, actually - make it legible, that makes it easier to regulate and tax! ... Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power. So that seems like the real motive, here.

In the internal logic of these claims, it's not "defeatist" so much as looking at things as they are. A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not. It's not about renouncing egalitarian ideals at all, it's being serious about pursuing them to the greatest feasible extent.

> why lean to "let's just anoint the rich" over "let's more aggressively limit them"?

The two can easily go hand in hand. In Classical Greece, being publicly acknowledged as "rich" meant that you would be forced to pay for public works. (And the public valuation of your assets was backed by an offer to exchange them for cash! So if you thought that the valuation was too high, you could take the offer and be better off in the end. How much is a Harvard tenured professor position worth, in the modern day and age?)

> Except I'm struggling to see why the elites would actually want that if it's not about formalizing and ENHANCING their power.

Because trust is a positive sum game. Lack of transparency is only an advantage to those who plan to take advantage of it. This is how more limited and legible ("formalized") power can translate to enhanced power.

There's a neat little rhetorical trick you're doing here:

> A complex society will always have elites, as a simple matter of structure. The remaining question is whether those elite social positions should be legible or not.

"Whether or not they should be legible or not" is not the only remaining question. Nor, I think, is "legible" the right word for what seems like it's being proposed - a return to "aristocracy" is not about just labeling, it's about formalizing and legitimizing power. Legible is a flashlight, not a scepter.

In recent history it's not even a particularly primary one compared to "how much should we tax, regulate, and break up those elites." In more violent revolutions, it's also been "should they get the guillotine?" You're talking purely legibility and not "accountability" or "what happens next." I think things are legible enough that we could hold the powerful more accountable than we do today if we wanted to. Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.

And that violent example is a particularly important thing to remember if you're tempted to trust the elites to not hide and obfuscate even while making claims of "just making things legible." I don't think "should it be legible" is a particularly interesting question because I don't trust them to play by the rules anyway. When have they before?

> ...it's about formalizing and legitimizing power.

Again, power is a pervasive feature of any complex society. Do you pick formal and legitimized power, or power that's completely illegitimate and shorn of any formality?

> Making Peter Thiel a Duke isn't going to help.

If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.

> If you have some sort of proceedings to make Peter Thiel a Duke, there might also be ways to strip him of his title for cause. Which might actually increase the public's collective power over acknowledged elites, and that without any resort to the more physical means you alluded to in your comment. After all, it would be more of a routine quasi-criminal sanction than a social revolution.

This is specious reasoning. There's a process that turns both of us into mulch (it involves a woodchipper), but you shouldn't attempt that process based on the inference that a reverse process (a mulch-to-human machine?) must therefore exist.

It's not like I'm inventing anything here. Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing. Far more reversible than things like the guillotine, which in practice was way more comparable to your human-to-mulch machine - and that in its long-range society-wide effects, as much as its more immediate ones.

> Back in the times and places where noble titles were taken seriously as markers of increased social legitimacy, stripping people of them was an acknowledged thing.

It was not an "acknowledged thing." It was a bloody, brutal affair. Men fighting for titles is probably the one thing that measures up to religion in terms of lives lost.

And all of this before refuting the central point: the duke of some random duchy in 1305 had no "increased social legitimacy" in any way that matters to contemporary humans. He was able to petition whatever king he served, and he could rule over his own land insofar as someone with a bigger army didn't mind. It is, on face value, ridiculous that we're discussing this as a viable state of affairs.

That wasn't just men fighting for titles, it was quite literally men fighting for their turf. The modern equivalent would be an all-out war among drug cartels. Later on, with the onset of the early modern era powerful monarchies managed to check the violence and gradually turned noble titles into more of a social reward for public services rendered. This is the context that those who view "kings and aristocracies" positively might have in mind.

Well, that's an interesting point. Before we follow some far-right vision of restoring the nobility, we'd better find out exactly which version they have in mind. We'd also better think seriously about what constraints are going to be able to prevent it from turning into the worse version.

These fancy historical metaphors should be put next to actual modern examples of monarchy in action: the British and European aristocracy and the covert power they wield and the hidden wealth they hoard, the House of Saud and other Gulf Arab royals and their excesses, and what is the ruling regime of the DPRK if not a virtual monarchy under the Kims?

What nonsense. Generally the only way to remove a title was war, or in the rare case of a sufficiently powerful liege, to commit a serious crime against the them.

Bullshit. Invent any new title you want, you will still get powerful people who aren't holders of that title and whom control the holders of that title. If thats all you wanted, inventing a new position won't do shit. This only furthers the argument that what you actually wanted if that was your goal is to start severely limiting the power of someone who reaches a certain level of wealth or influence etc.

I think you are making the mistake of reading too hard into these writings and somehow managed to invent a meaning in it. The reality is unfortunately as simple as that these people imagine they would get to be kings and rule over everyone. The philosophy dropout verbose word vomit is required to obscure this simple and obviously idiotic point because of course why would anyone pay attention to it otherwise.

>>After all, we know disruption and innovation rarely comes from big incumbents. Tax the shit out of them and turn that into funding and options for the rest.

Making it less likely that companies become very large, profitable and valuable discourages investment in companies of all sizes, by reducing returns on small cap and venture capital investing.

As for direct effectd, "taxing the shit out of" the rich, as you suggest, would impact far more than large incumbents. It would reduce the incentive for the rich to invest in general, by reducing the size of the reward for becoming very wealthy, encourage capital flight and expatriation of the highly ambitious and capable, and reduce the after-tax income of the best investors, and with it, the volume of new investment.

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