The occasional beheading of government officials would restore in the remaining officials their healthy fear of the populace. From Bill Bonner at bonnerprivateresearch.com:
(No kings were harmed in the making of this AI generated image. Source: Substack)
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Baltimore, Maryland…
The best government is a monarchy…with an occasional beheading.
~ Voltaire
Yes, Karl Marx was right about one thing. There’s a difference between people who work on the assembly lines and the people who own them.
About $20 million of difference, per family. That’s the 21st century gap between what the average non-asset owner gained from his wages and what the average member of the asset-owning elite 1% gained.
Our friend, David Stockman clarifies:
[S]ince money-printing went into permanent high gear after the dotcom crash in 2000, the top 1% of households have gained $20 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth. Likewise, the top 0.1% or 131,000 households at the tippy top of the economic ladder have gained $88 million each in inflation-adjusted net worth.
…during the last 22 years the median real annual wage, as tracked by Social Security payroll tax records, has risen by only 14.5% or just $235 per annum. And, no, we didn’t omit any zeros from that figure. These piddling gains amount to just $4.50 per week on average.
These annual inflation-adjusted gains in the median wage compare to real net worth gains of nearly $1 million and $4 million per annum for the top 1% and top 0.1%, respectively. In relative terms, these annual wealth gains for the top 1% were 4,250X larger than the median real wage gain and 17,000X larger for the top o.1%.
We, the Rabble
Pity the “People’… the non-deciders…the middle class… hoi polloi…the majority…the voters! They are like hungry mice waiting for crumbs to fall from the table.
But ours is not a whine about ‘inequality.’ We take it for granted that all people are not created equal. Some are leaders. Most are followers. Some are thinkers; most leave the thinking to others. Inequality is inevitable…undeniable…part of the ‘way we are;’ we sort ourselves into teams, tribes, classes, castes, sects, clubs, nations and races.
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That someone is wealthy is irrelevant to the fact that someone is poor in a ‘free market’ economy. The rich (if producers) do not take money out of the economy by being wealthy; they are constantly using capital (which means poor people are employed and are gainfully producing) to create, build, and sell. The only economy that makes people poor (as opposed to themselves being poor by choice) is a state-run economy that plunders the people and makes them pay to be allowed to live and get nothing in return. If a man owns all the iron ore in the world but does nothing with it except to keep others from using it, he is poor. When he acts on the ore, improves it by smelting it and sells it (trades with someone else), he changes his life and becomes better off financially and improves the lives of others by making the product available, even if that was not his intent.
Inventing something new and valuable might redirect a society’s ability to produce, transport, and consume better-quality products, but that is only the beginning of the journey. The following improvements increase production, availability, quality, and price reduction, making it available to even people experiencing poverty. There will always be those who, in comparison, are poor. Making that distinction fails to consider that even though there is a great difference in what one has compared to another, this line of thinking fails to consider what one does. Some people cannot create on a grand scale; this does not preclude them from having an abundant life. Even the dull, if they will live on less than they make, invest in something that does produce wealth, they will have more than their needs.
What creates the disparity in a state-run economy is that the enslaved people are plundered of all that can be taken from them without killing them, for the politicians need the slave to remain alive so that he can be plundered. The disparity between the rich and the poor now is because violence is used to steal, government destroys instead of creates. The motivation for those in power is not to create and trade but to steal and control those it enslaves. The increase in the wealth of the upper class in a state-run economy is to maintain the lifestyle of the enslavers; the slaves barely survive on the decreasing value of their labor and fiat currency. America does not have a free market economy. If someone thinks the answer is to use violence to steal from the rich instead of stealing from the poor to ‘equalize’ and bring fairness to life, the only thing that has changed is who is plundered and who gets the loot. It is still not a free market economy.
Power cannot be entrusted to anyone. If a government has the power to dictate who is allowed to create and produce, it is already corrupt beyond redemption, and it will attract only those who are evil and without moral values. It is impossible to control a government that has the permission of those it governs to use violence to achieve its ends. The desired goal of every government is enslavement. There were some men at the start of America who thought they could design a government that would not be able to be controlled by tyrants; they made the best attempt in this world. It went awry with the first president and has deteriorated steadily since. America is not on the verge of becoming a socialist state; it is one. It has secret courts, the ability to control the lives of its citizens, telling them they cannot go to work, associate with others, communicate at any level without permission, do any work without permission, and have the state take as much as it wants from the worker, leaving only subsistence for the slave. Attempts to adjust the state either aggravate it, ensuring its violent reaction, or redirect efforts, but the state does not change. ~ Chad Chadburn
“It really comes down to more for them and less for us.”
George Carlin