Elite proliferation -- the very rich and their hangers-on -- need by small in numbers if there is to be any semblance of economic equity... and in the end, any real economic growth.
I see several possible economic elites in the past and present:
1. Big landowners who get easy money from leasing needed property (farmland or urban housing) to people who have no viable alternatives. Think of the usual lord of the manor in medieval times -- or Donald Trump today. If it is easier to make money by leasing to a software engineer or an advertising executive than being a software engineer or advertising executive, then we have an exploitative elite.
2. Sell-out intellectuals. Shamans for the hunter-gatherers; high-level clergy (bishops and higher, if not monks and parish priests in the Middle Ages; televangelists, corporate lawyers, political operatives, and lobbyists today.
3. Bureaucratic elitists, whether the Soviet nomenklatura or the executive elite of contemporary America, being paid very well for treating subordinates badly.
4. Organized crime.
We Americans have all four elite cliques, and we may be approaching the limit of supporting all four.
Small business is not an elite. It can't buy lobbyists and it has no guarantee of an income stream. Easy money for a few is a curse for us all, and not the blessing that the Right would have us believe.
I see several possible economic elites in the past and present:
1. Big landowners who get easy money from leasing needed property (farmland or urban housing) to people who have no viable alternatives. Think of the usual lord of the manor in medieval times -- or Donald Trump today. If it is easier to make money by leasing to a software engineer or an advertising executive than being a software engineer or advertising executive, then we have an exploitative elite.
2. Sell-out intellectuals. Shamans for the hunter-gatherers; high-level clergy (bishops and higher, if not monks and parish priests in the Middle Ages; televangelists, corporate lawyers, political operatives, and lobbyists today.
3. Bureaucratic elitists, whether the Soviet nomenklatura or the executive elite of contemporary America, being paid very well for treating subordinates badly.
4. Organized crime.
We Americans have all four elite cliques, and we may be approaching the limit of supporting all four.
Small business is not an elite. It can't buy lobbyists and it has no guarantee of an income stream. Easy money for a few is a curse for us all, and not the blessing that the Right would have us believe.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.