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Are you trying to butter up your audience, dude? Is it campaigning season for nobility seats already? Your motte-approved opinions, appreciation for wholesome americana, and humble family beginnings are besides the point. No configuration of these parameters would justify that privilege.
You say you want to recognize luck and ‘a sense of duty’(applause), but your method is to recognize blood instead of merit, both subject to luck. Luck is tangential to your argument. If luck was our primary concern, we should forget blood and merit, and draw lots for membership in the ruling class.
The angry journalist at vice also believes he is helping society by supporting opposite causes to your own. In his defense, his self-interest is hidden, he doesn’t nakedly request aristocratic status for his prosocial efforts.
I don't really see a better proxy for judging a sense of duty to others than blood/nobility. Anecdotally, the people in my family who have inherited their wealth generationally have significantly more sense of responsibility to the community and those around them than the ones on the other side of my family who believe they've earned their wealth and refuse to take care of their homes and barely invest their resources to help themselves, let alone the people in their families or the broader community. I suspect this stems from the sense of fear that those born into no money feel toward money, whereas the family members who always had money were much less fearful about it and happier to spread the wealth around. Frankly I want to be ruled by people who are secure in their wealth and are willing to spend it to improve their lives and the lives of those around them rather than by people who want to hoard their resources out of learned apprehension and fear. Family history of wealth tracks the former better than any other metric I can imagine.
I have a hard time thinking of a worse one. The history of "nobility" is largely one of forcefully looting as much wealth as possible from what are effectively slaves, held in place with military force. What was the nobility's reaction to the peasantry being able to demand higher wages after the Black Death, or move to cities for the same end? Was it to encourage this natural economic development which improved productivity even at their own cost? Of course not, they passed laws prohibiting peasants from leaving so that they could not get those higher wages.
The feeling of societal obligation you're talking about--and in particular, a feeling of societal obligation that actually helps other people and does not consider the rigid maintenance of the existing order for the sake of "stability" to be the primary obligation--is extremely rare.
Communism. Like, it's not even close.
For most of that history, wealth as we understand the term effectively didn't exist, because there wasn't a workable way to create it. Most people were subsistence farmers, and the military force was necessary to prevent the next guy over from rolling through and looting all the portable goods. Anything better than that required a level of structure and coordination that no one involved could maintain.
You understand that food has to be made, a process that takes a lot of work with a lag-time of several months to a year? If everyone abandons the fields to go chase better wages in the cities, where does the next harvest come from? What happens to the people in those newly crowded cities?
By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.
Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.
According to that simple math, we should all be starving because we don’t work the land. If the salaries were higher in the cities, so was productivity. In simple terms, they more than made up for the loss of their farming work by producing tools, trading for better crops etc, which allowed the farmers to support them, and enriched society in the process.
They didn’t do it to be dicks, but because it was in their interest, like a boss who refuses a raise. The difference being, that boss wouldn’t take ‘fuck you, then. I’m off’ for a legal answer.
With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different?
What evidence is this statement based on? What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?
Preventing famine is in everyone's interest, the poorest most of all. Again, I'm open to being corrected if it can be clearly demonstrated that a better path was available, and that the people passing the laws should reasonably have been expected to recognize it. I'd even accept evidence that their motivations for trying to keep people farming was something other than "if we don't have enough farmers everyone will starve".
More generally, how was keeping them on the farm supposed to be in the bosses' interest, specifically? If these people moved to the cities and generated wealth as you allege, wouldn't that make the bosses' positions better? Why wouldn't they want that to happen? Why wouldn't they think that would happen?
We'd also be starving if we worked the land. Not starving is not about working the land, it's about all those things produced by people who don't work the land.
Take trade, for example. No need to work the land if you can trade clothes or swords for more polish or egyptian grain than you could ever have produced. And the mere presence of that transport capacity makes famine less likely.
Do you think the highly urbanized low countries were the ones starving when famine struck ? This would be what your theory straightforwardly predicts.
The difference is the benefit doesn’t accrue to them, it accrues to society. 5000 dollars in my pocket has quite a bit more weight than a million for the state.
As always, they were stupid and self-interested. If they honestly believed they were altruistically trying to stave off starvation, they could simply have agreed to the raises. But they wanted to maximize their own surplus at the cost of the peasants, and took away their leverage by force.
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