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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.
The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.
A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.
B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.
C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.
But...
A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore
B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...
C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.
This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.
The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.
The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.
A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.
Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.
Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?
I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.
I tend to be much more enamored with the idea of interlocking relationships with duties for each person as a better model. If I want more power and more freedoms, I must find a way to climb the dominance hierarchy. I must do so by doing things other people find useful in some way, and I’d have some responsibility to those beneath me. And on the other hand, if I simply wish to do as little as possible, that’s fine, but I would have to give up privileges to do that, and one of those is that I’d have to obey those above me.
Honestly, social structures like this show up everywhere, or at least often enough, that I suspect this is simply how natural human society works. You obey those above you and protect and teach those below you, and for the most part you end up with a fairly stable and functional society. And I don’t see this being completely incompatible with the concept of those natural rights that simply constrain the government from interfering in them.
I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.
If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.
If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.
If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.
I don't know if SBF is the best example to use considering he is likely going to spend a considerable amount of time in prison and will almost certainly not be allowed to work in any banking/stock market capacity or otherwise manage anyone's money but his own when released. I don't see his job prospects being too great other than as a speaker at banking ethics seminars where he tells everybody about how he was a billionaire who lost everything due to his own poor decisions. Some day I'll do a full writeup on the mortgage crisis and what caused it, but for now suffice it to say that it wasn't the kind of thing that could have been prevented by more personal accountability, unless you want to go so far as to make any financial innovation so risky that we're still operating on a barter system.
Tanking your own career and losing money that you yourself earned (or had "earned" via fraud) is not the same as bankrupting your entire family estate which had been passed down for generations and shared with your family. If SBF was managing the funds of a few dozen siblings/cousins/aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews instead of random strangers, he simultaneously would have been more careful and would have had more oversight from them.
As for the mortgage crisis, my understanding of it was that bad mortgages were packaged up and misleadingy labeled and sold as if they were better than they actually were. Which means when they failed the people who created the bad mortgages in the first place were not the ones who suffered for it, which is another form of lack of skin in the game. If mortgages could not be resold, the people who made them would have lost their own money, or more likely would have recognized the danger to themselves and not made bad mortgages in the first place. I'm not saying "make it illegal to resell mortgages" is actually a good solution, there are an awful lot of benefits to modern economies that maybe make up for the costs of losing skin in the game in many places, but it is a huge cost and an awful lot of the problems we see in the modern economy are those costs.
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