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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.
If the plebes want noblesse oblige they better start showing some obeiscence. The UMC class is already funding your continued existence, start showing some gratitude instead of "Eat the rich" (sidenote: it's much more efficient to eat the poor instead, but that's a
digestiondigression for a different day) and then we can talk.Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered? I don't see them working on farms or getting involved in the actual distribution of tangible and meaningful resources. In actuality they're simply skimming off the top, and providing anti-services in the form of hostile doctrines and policies which make life worse for the people underneath them. The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.
Just because the UMC class don't physically partake in creating food, clothes and shelter doesn't mean they aren't integral to it's production at the levels we have today. Norman Borlaug's invention of more hardy wheat strains etc. led to a massive increase in the capacity of the world to reliably feed itself, he has done far more for the world's net food production than any random two bit farmer in a tractor (which I must add was envisaged, designed and continues to be iteratively improved on by UMC level engineers).
I work in finance (though not in IB) I assure you your food in the shop where you buy it from would be 20+% more expensive if investment bankers who broker deals in the background didn't exist, as well as your life being generally shittier, no different to it being shittier if you had to live with the computing power we had in the 1990s, which is yet another thing the PMC provides (technological progress).
But all this is moot, I was talking about their net tax contributions that end up getting spent by the lower classes. It doesn't matter one whit whether the UMC produces a single grain of wheat, a single strand of silk or a single beam of lumber if they can trade their money (which they by and large got because someone was willing to give it to them for something in exchange) for it. On a countrywide level that's no different to producing the item indigenously, the end result in both cases is you got yourself some grain, cloth or shelter that wasn't present before in your borders, and they can do this trade easily with a farmer in Ukraine or a grower in China. The terminal problem is not with the worldwide lower classes who by and large know their place, it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world whose only crime is being born somewhere without a sizable highly earning UMC they can extort money from.
Oh, my apologies! I thought you'd just made a typo while referring to the PMC. I'm actually legitimately unsure what you are referring to when you say UMC class - Upper middle class class? I wasn't thinking of people like Norman Borlaug, but people like Robin DiAngelo, Sheryl Sandberg or Ibram Kendi who largely produce nothing but toxic culture war effluvia. I have some more substantive things I want to say in response to your other points, but I'd rather clear this up first because I'm not sure I ultimately disagree with you.
Oh I absolutely agree people like Kendi are a net negative. I was meaning UMC to refer to roughly people in the top 4-5% of the income distribution. Yeah I agree I was basically using UMC and PMC interchangeably here, should have been more precise. This group probably does include some unsavory characters like Kendi, especially those who can set themselves up a good grift to extract resources from their followers but I would say the lower classes who net consume government spending have an even higher proportion of unsavory characters relative to those who do productive work like making food or clothes.
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