Dear friends,
It seems to me, there are three types of economic organization, or so we are told, two of them, communism and socialism are oligarchic in nature, while actual free enterprise is polity in action. If we diagram systems of government on two axis, the vertical one having freedom at the top and totalitarianism at the bottom, and the horizontal line having populism on the right and elitism on the left… almost every government that has existed has been in the lower left quadrant. Even the government of the US Founding Fathers. The government and the resulting economic system they created, and Adam Smith explained, was in the upper right of the lower left quadrant. All the others, socialism, communism, feudalism, etc… exist at the extreme bottom left corner.
Aristotle said there are three right forms of government, three wrong forms and an ideal form. In his famous book, Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle described his ideas on government. He said the three right forms are, Monarchy, Aristocracy and Polity. The three wrong forms are, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. What the wrong forms have in common is, each of them rules for the benefit of the rulers. The right forms of government rule for the benefit of the whole of the citizenry. Monarchy and aristocracy exist on the left side of the graph, the elitist side. While polity exists on the right side, the populist side. Because under polity, the people rule, but under monarchy and aristocracy, the elite rule. The ideal government according to Aristotle, is Republican, the blending of the right forms.
Government can be populist or elitist. Put another way, government can be run by the elite or the people, all governments though, almost by definition, are run by the elites and experts. Populism is mistakenly defined as where the elites run the government ostensibly for the benefit of the people. Communism and socialism pretend to be populist in this way. Yet pragmatically, they have never existed for the benefit of the hoi polloi, they embrace totalitarianism. The Nazis supposedly represented the folkish state, the Chinese Communist Party supposedly represents the people, and the US bureaucracy supposedly protects the constitution. When in reality, all of them do the opposite of what they say. They are all run by and for the elite, not the people, so they are all elitist.
We all know governments fall on a scale of tyranny. Some let their people be pretty free while others are oppressively regulating. Lifting some on the vertical scale of the graph, but still hard to the elitist side. The elite, even in states where there is relative freedom, don’t like being questioned. Their expertise surpasses that of the average citizen. The adage by Linas Torvalds notwithstanding… Given enough eyes even the most hard to find bug is obvious. The experts need no eyes other than their own. As a result no government passes the center line of the elitist/populist horizontal axis. The US Started at, or perhaps slightly above the center line, but since the Woodrow Wilson administration, it has plummeted to near the bottom. Especially given the progressive innovation of mail in election fraud.
The upper right hand quadrant of that graph is utterly unexplored territory. (Other than ancient Athens). The experts would exclaim such populist ideas would lead to anarchy! Even as the so called populists cry that too much freedom would allow the rich to exploit the poor! They all agree, the elite need to have total power over us, to protect us from them. To that end the elite have maintained an education system that is political indoctrination. It doesn’t teach reading, writing, math or history, an AI app on your cell phone can do those things for you. Instead, they teach us to be hopeless, angry and confused. A better solution would be to educate kids to think for themselves… to create citizens capable of living under a government that exists at the upper right quadrant, for a real change.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
