When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, their work is non-essential and pay them to loaf you get a population that begins to believe you and act like non-essential humans.
Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame. Turn that wagging finger around and point it at yourselves there, light-in-the-loafers buddy-boys and girls. They put that mind poison into the populace. Now they get to reap the crop they sowed. A lot of those non-essential humans took the time they were forced to take off reading up on the world of things, learning who thinks they're so essential they get to tell others they aren't. And they discovered a whole lot they never would've bothered to discover. And now the people like Mr. Gurner have a big and growing problem on their hands. And the lesson that's coming isn't the one that he and they think it will be.
Your last two sentences are key. Gurner’s statements are exactly what the indentured servant class needs to rouse them from their burnout, depression, and addictions. The pandemic has backfired. Far more people are now awake to the scams that were previously unquestionably accepted. Gurner, who is not even a billionaire, is probably third or fourth tier among the truly wealthy. He doesn’t even rate an invite to Davos or Aspen. Among the truly wealthy, he is still considered working class. He probably thinks that this kind of openly frank statement will get him points with the rulers. But he is wrong--possibly dead wrong. The last thing the rulers want is an awakened populous, lest “The Joker” movie comes to their own secret compounds. In the long term, social inequalities are self-correcting. This may seem like good news, and to an extent it is. OTOH, it also means the rulers will make sure the next engineered crisis will involve Old Testament level mass murder. Which will happened first, the global revolt of the commoners, or the final solution of the global rulers? That's the question.
It was the middle classes who got lazy during covid - while the working class/migrants carried on doing essential work of cleaning our arses, bringing our goods from amazon, working in shops, factory farming, slaughter houses, junk food, prostitution, sweat shops, cleaning hospitals, portering..- the rest of us took furlow and many got paid doing other jobs as well. Small businesses of lower middle classes were also destroyed in favour of global corporations.
Wow, property developers tell you stuff and that alters your life, your mindset?
If you need to be told if you are essential or not and if you believe what they tell you, you are clearly non-essential, deal with it. No government authority, no benevolent dictator, and no collective of upper-middle-class over-educated, underemployed whiners is going to make you essential. But the reality is that no one is essential, great men and terrible ones die every day and the world keeps going.
Here is his message: "When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, ...(they) act like non-essential humans...Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame"
I prefer a different approach. Tattoo "Property is Theft" on his forehead in Comic Sans Serif! Then hold him upside down (metaphorically speaking) and catch all of his assets for wealth redistribution amongst real authentic humans who are in need.
"The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. "
Yep, the capitalists are saying the usually unspoken part out loud nowadays. They're not hiding their contempt for the workers anymore. "Normality" to them means millions upon millions suffering hunger, joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness. Let's start fighting back, fellow workers. I think it's time the only people "unemployed" are the billionaires and their buddies. We can demonstrate to them how them being "unemployed" and the workers seizing the means of production is much better than guillotines.
Lack of use of guillotines to kill the elites also got us into WW1, WW2, and all the US Interventions since (death toll approaching 20 million or more, including over 5 million just in the 'war on terror'). The longer we delay, the more millions of dead are going to pile up.
One might say that World Wars 1 and 2, the US interventions, the Russian and other civil wars, all the ethnic, religious, and tribal strife in between, all were updated uses of the guillotine. Those who operate guillotines are almost always sure they're right and working for a better future. As Stalin said, "If you kill one man, it's murder. If you kill a million men, it's a statistic." A lot of people are willing to kill a few million statistics for a better world. The only problem is that you might turn out to be one of the statistics. But if you have a serious jones for guillotines, ranting on the Net isn't the way to advance the cause. The most effective form of social organization for killing people is a regular modern army. That's why the most advanced states always take care to keep one around. If you want to knock a few people off to improve the world, or maybe many, that's your best bet, plus, you'll be in tune with our sociopathic great leaders. The ranting and raving and rayvoloosion stuff is comparatively a waste of time and some other things you might want to keep.
Neoliberalism has been in effect for half a century . It is not only a declaration of war on the working class, but on democracy and whole societies. We are now in the ruins and the revolution starts with people educating themselves on what neoliberalism is and what it has done to our societies. So much of what is wrong now is a result of neoliberalism where corporate power dominates governments.
I am not at all surprised he would say what he says in public as this is part of the arrogance of the very rich and the contempt they hold for the working class and public interest in general.
I also suspect he was playing to his audience--as the multimillionaire redneck.
Every ploy will be used by the owner class to distract and deflect from the fundamental economic war that capitalist must continually wage on workers to make production as efficient as possible!
Keeping in mind that efficient and profitable mean pretty much the same thing. I have only recently discovered that there exists in the world people who are described as “shareholder activists” who campaign to maximise profits and dividends, up to and including demanding layoffs in an already profitable business.
“ efficient and profitable mean pretty much the same thing”. Ha, ha! The most popular board game in American history is monopoly! Profitability is based on control of the market! Efficiency is a secondary concern.
Parasite class. Excellent expression. Government-enabled. I am reminded of Bastiat...
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
All enabled by unrestrained government. Do not confuse free-enterprise restrained by natural law with what you call capitalism; they are not the same. See comment on better mousetrap.
Land value (not the buildings) is the sole appropriate object of taxation, and along with judicious import tariffs could easily supply all the money that government needs.
Taxing work (income tax) discourages work. Taxing commerce (sales tax) discourages commerce. But taxing land at the right level does not discourage any productive activity. It discourages only non-productive land owning. The right level of tax on land is the rent on the unimproved land, which should be taxed at 100%. There should be 0% tax on improvements or buildings though, because those represent productive work.
Hong Kong has a partially Georgist tax system, and it works very well there, reducing their income tax and sales tax and encouraging economic growth.
Too much sense there... Govt across the West currently exists to support the parasites at the top and keep the bottom poor through regressive taxation. Totalitarian movements have historically increased disparity (lords and serfs) through the twin hammers of taxation and inflation and it appears to be the game plan again... It never ends well.
Inflation could be nicely solved by going back to the tried and true use of physical silver coins by _weight_ and not by "dollars" or other imaginary units. The British Pound was originally a literal pound of silver.
All other forms of payment should be labelled as "merely a debt, not money" to make their risk perfectly clear in relation to silver metal. So internet commerce could continue, but with promises of silver instead of promises of dollars.
Of course the ruling class owns the printing press which allows them to buy real assets with fresh bits of paper, so they are not going to give up and go back to silver unless the majority of the population makes it perfectly clear to them that they have no choice.
Work is slavery made respectable. We don't need more work. Only slaves feel a need for work. We need more leisure and a material world that will support it.
It wasn't adopted only because it was systematically undermined and discouraged by wealthy landowners.
It remains objectively speaking the best possible tax. Even Winston Churchill admitted as much until someone seems to have had a chat with him about the basis of wealth for the English upper classes.
if these owners are still there, it seems you'll first have to overcome that hurdle, unless they've become convinced that georgism is best for everyone in the meantime.
I couldn't have said it any better. We need a new paradigm.
We still have the 70% who believe that they don't deserve to live without struggle.
Interesting that the most-liked comment here still regards the idea that "people have gotten lazy" (paraphrased).
The old idea dies hard. The one that says that your worth is tied to your productivity, and that the "problem" is that people got used to not working.
As I've said many times, the world is full of Einstein's that are tied up washing dishes or sitting at desks bored to tears. If everyone was allowed to do and had the freedom to do what they are best at, we would transform our planet.
But unfortunately most of those people are too busy trying to survive. And maybe it will take a time period where people get to just BE, and heal, and discover who they are.
Then everyone can be "productive" in their own way -- a way that doesn't necessarily satisfy an exploitative capitalist.
And if what this guy said isn't the perfect example of a caste system and ideology, then I don't know what is.
I agree with your assessment of the hard-working nature of Americans, but I disagree that so many think they deserve to be worked to their deaths (my phrasing.) I know this space is overwhelmingly free of red/blue bs, but as a class-based leftist in a 70% red county in Georgia, I'd say my neighbors know that how things are going now are NOT okay and NOT deserved. Yes many buy the deflection to immigrants argument, but most people I know are quite upset by the wage situation nowadays. And the lack of benefits, or affordable benefits, and especially the cost of living, especially food. Working class people who don't follow the news instinctively know they're getting conned. Again I apologize for bringing in red/blue bs, but I want to defend my fellow Georgians and Southerners, because the mainstream stereotypes are wrong. It's almost hilarious how the least "informed" per establishment criteria are actually the most aware that the entire establishment is corrupt.
My intent was to jump way ahead and speak to the acceptance of the nationalist/democracy/capitalism mindset that most people here accept as the only choice of our reality in this country. The idea that this system is just off-track and can be righted.
Most people never consider that there are many other options to existence, and that we could explore those if we weren't so busy trying to survive in a corrupted system that we think we can fix.
I offer my compassion and empathy to all of us.
And a call to look beyond what we have been sold. It doesn't have to be this way.
Right on, Caitlin. This is why I am a Marxist. People like Gurner and the rest of his class are the enemies of workers the world over. They need to remember what happened in the French and Russian Revolutions and will happen again.
I will keep this short and simple. The notion that employers shouldn't feel lucky to have workers means that they see labor having little to no value. Yet without labor, they wealthy don't profit. So when inflation goes up rarely do we see wages rising anywhere near the inflation, because wages have no cost of living adjustment for the majority of people.
Next, the concept of having employees experiencing economic pain on the level beyond the Americian great depression is insane. Worse than medieval oppression and essentially a point to legalize slavery or literally indentured servitude through debt. The wealthy feel entitled to their wealth and ability to oppress people. I wonder how many days they could work in their own sweatshops or assembly lines being paid what those people are living on. They forget that they steal money from workers, they didn't earn most of it.
When the reckoning comes, be discerning; the one who invents a better mouse trap then employs people who manufacture them should not be thought of as deserving the same as people who trade paper or trade people.
And how exactly has this self-important princeling measured the level of laziness among the working class? Has he ever talked with a worker? His saying all this BS is strictly for The Fraternity and like a red herring to steer away any considerations for government stipulated price freezes to halt the greed induced rise in foodstuff prices.
Billionaires are allowed and encouraged to exist for their the same reason kings allowed aristocrats to exist. They help enforce the ideology that the many exist to support a few.
Romans were clear about this and simply designated people as slaves, while allowing some slaves and other people of their assimilated cultures to work hard enough for the empire to become wealthy, themselves, though never, or rarely, could they attain ruling class status.
This creates the illusion that the class-based system is merit-based, which helps reinforce compliance among the many who remain and will remain poor, because they believe they could potentially escape their lower class status.
Someone clever once said that working class Americans voted for Republicans (Reagan’s Republicans) because they saw themselves not as poor, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Similarity, the British ‘reform’ of the parliamentary system was necessary, because as modernity led many to eschew religious promises of an opulent afterlife as payment for a life of good work and poverty, they needed a new illusion to govern the working classes. Otherwise, why instead of getting rid completely of the peerage system and house of lords, did they simply allow the PM to elevate some imperial boffins to peer status?
However, how many Republicans, ie those who want the monarchy abolished, are tapped in this way?
While pondering the state of the world during the summer of 2020, my old neighbour here in NW Italy observed then that “according to the wealthy, when the owner had a Mercedes and the worker a (Fiat) 500, the balance was correct but, now that the worker can have also have a Mercedes, the balance is wrong.”
When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, their work is non-essential and pay them to loaf you get a population that begins to believe you and act like non-essential humans.
Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame. Turn that wagging finger around and point it at yourselves there, light-in-the-loafers buddy-boys and girls. They put that mind poison into the populace. Now they get to reap the crop they sowed. A lot of those non-essential humans took the time they were forced to take off reading up on the world of things, learning who thinks they're so essential they get to tell others they aren't. And they discovered a whole lot they never would've bothered to discover. And now the people like Mr. Gurner have a big and growing problem on their hands. And the lesson that's coming isn't the one that he and they think it will be.
Your last two sentences are key. Gurner’s statements are exactly what the indentured servant class needs to rouse them from their burnout, depression, and addictions. The pandemic has backfired. Far more people are now awake to the scams that were previously unquestionably accepted. Gurner, who is not even a billionaire, is probably third or fourth tier among the truly wealthy. He doesn’t even rate an invite to Davos or Aspen. Among the truly wealthy, he is still considered working class. He probably thinks that this kind of openly frank statement will get him points with the rulers. But he is wrong--possibly dead wrong. The last thing the rulers want is an awakened populous, lest “The Joker” movie comes to their own secret compounds. In the long term, social inequalities are self-correcting. This may seem like good news, and to an extent it is. OTOH, it also means the rulers will make sure the next engineered crisis will involve Old Testament level mass murder. Which will happened first, the global revolt of the commoners, or the final solution of the global rulers? That's the question.
It was the middle classes who got lazy during covid - while the working class/migrants carried on doing essential work of cleaning our arses, bringing our goods from amazon, working in shops, factory farming, slaughter houses, junk food, prostitution, sweat shops, cleaning hospitals, portering..- the rest of us took furlow and many got paid doing other jobs as well. Small businesses of lower middle classes were also destroyed in favour of global corporations.
Gurner is not even accurate in what happened.
Wow, property developers tell you stuff and that alters your life, your mindset?
If you need to be told if you are essential or not and if you believe what they tell you, you are clearly non-essential, deal with it. No government authority, no benevolent dictator, and no collective of upper-middle-class over-educated, underemployed whiners is going to make you essential. But the reality is that no one is essential, great men and terrible ones die every day and the world keeps going.
https://i.imgflip.com/2yzky9.jpg
Here is his message: "When you tell people for the better part of three years that they are non-essential humans, ...(they) act like non-essential humans...Tim Gurner and his ilk are the ones who created this mindset. They did it. Them. Their fault. They are the ones to blame"
Show me how I misinterpreted that.
What is the 'correct' perspective?
This guy needs to be introduced to a wood chipper.
I really like your thinking. Might I suggest feet first?
Good idea - maybe pause a brief bit at the ankles before pushing forward.
You might enjoy this -
https://leftymathprof.wordpress.com/executioner/
Saving that Max Headroom / Don jr. / Butthead thing for last?
LOL! Indeed!
I prefer a different approach. Tattoo "Property is Theft" on his forehead in Comic Sans Serif! Then hold him upside down (metaphorically speaking) and catch all of his assets for wealth redistribution amongst real authentic humans who are in need.
The billionaires' best friend!
Yeah, my first thought on reading this story in Aussie media was 'This guy must be trying to shorten his own life expectancy'.
He should be helped in his quest.
"The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality, and we’re seeing it. "
Yep, the capitalists are saying the usually unspoken part out loud nowadays. They're not hiding their contempt for the workers anymore. "Normality" to them means millions upon millions suffering hunger, joblessness, homelessness, hopelessness. Let's start fighting back, fellow workers. I think it's time the only people "unemployed" are the billionaires and their buddies. We can demonstrate to them how them being "unemployed" and the workers seizing the means of production is much better than guillotines.
Nahhh. We oughta at least give guillotines a try.
The last people famous for operating guillotines wound up with a military dictator and continent-wide imperialist and world-warrior.
Lack of use of guillotines to kill the elites also got us into WW1, WW2, and all the US Interventions since (death toll approaching 20 million or more, including over 5 million just in the 'war on terror'). The longer we delay, the more millions of dead are going to pile up.
One might say that World Wars 1 and 2, the US interventions, the Russian and other civil wars, all the ethnic, religious, and tribal strife in between, all were updated uses of the guillotine. Those who operate guillotines are almost always sure they're right and working for a better future. As Stalin said, "If you kill one man, it's murder. If you kill a million men, it's a statistic." A lot of people are willing to kill a few million statistics for a better world. The only problem is that you might turn out to be one of the statistics. But if you have a serious jones for guillotines, ranting on the Net isn't the way to advance the cause. The most effective form of social organization for killing people is a regular modern army. That's why the most advanced states always take care to keep one around. If you want to knock a few people off to improve the world, or maybe many, that's your best bet, plus, you'll be in tune with our sociopathic great leaders. The ranting and raving and rayvoloosion stuff is comparatively a waste of time and some other things you might want to keep.
History doesn’t always repeat - it just rhymes. We oughta give this a try.
Good point! 0.0
Neoliberalism has been in effect for half a century . It is not only a declaration of war on the working class, but on democracy and whole societies. We are now in the ruins and the revolution starts with people educating themselves on what neoliberalism is and what it has done to our societies. So much of what is wrong now is a result of neoliberalism where corporate power dominates governments.
I am not at all surprised he would say what he says in public as this is part of the arrogance of the very rich and the contempt they hold for the working class and public interest in general.
I also suspect he was playing to his audience--as the multimillionaire redneck.
Every ploy will be used by the owner class to distract and deflect from the fundamental economic war that capitalist must continually wage on workers to make production as efficient as possible!
Keeping in mind that efficient and profitable mean pretty much the same thing. I have only recently discovered that there exists in the world people who are described as “shareholder activists” who campaign to maximise profits and dividends, up to and including demanding layoffs in an already profitable business.
“ efficient and profitable mean pretty much the same thing”. Ha, ha! The most popular board game in American history is monopoly! Profitability is based on control of the market! Efficiency is a secondary concern.
Alexa, define the 'parasite class'...
Parasite class, synonym: Billionaire bastards
Eugenicist billionaire bastards, I think you may find... 😜
Parasite class. Excellent expression. Government-enabled. I am reminded of Bastiat...
"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."
All enabled by unrestrained government. Do not confuse free-enterprise restrained by natural law with what you call capitalism; they are not the same. See comment on better mousetrap.
And that's exactly what private property does, sweetie. "Free enterprise" is a propaganda term made up by neoliberals in the 1940s.
The solution is not communism, but Georgism:
https://patrick.net/post/1346922/2022-08-05-georgism-thread
Land value (not the buildings) is the sole appropriate object of taxation, and along with judicious import tariffs could easily supply all the money that government needs.
Taxing work (income tax) discourages work. Taxing commerce (sales tax) discourages commerce. But taxing land at the right level does not discourage any productive activity. It discourages only non-productive land owning. The right level of tax on land is the rent on the unimproved land, which should be taxed at 100%. There should be 0% tax on improvements or buildings though, because those represent productive work.
Hong Kong has a partially Georgist tax system, and it works very well there, reducing their income tax and sales tax and encouraging economic growth.
Too much sense there... Govt across the West currently exists to support the parasites at the top and keep the bottom poor through regressive taxation. Totalitarian movements have historically increased disparity (lords and serfs) through the twin hammers of taxation and inflation and it appears to be the game plan again... It never ends well.
Inflation could be nicely solved by going back to the tried and true use of physical silver coins by _weight_ and not by "dollars" or other imaginary units. The British Pound was originally a literal pound of silver.
All other forms of payment should be labelled as "merely a debt, not money" to make their risk perfectly clear in relation to silver metal. So internet commerce could continue, but with promises of silver instead of promises of dollars.
Of course the ruling class owns the printing press which allows them to buy real assets with fresh bits of paper, so they are not going to give up and go back to silver unless the majority of the population makes it perfectly clear to them that they have no choice.
Work is slavery made respectable. We don't need more work. Only slaves feel a need for work. We need more leisure and a material world that will support it.
why did it fail?
What failed?
this georgism. it seems an old idea that wasn't adopted worldwide.
It wasn't adopted only because it was systematically undermined and discouraged by wealthy landowners.
It remains objectively speaking the best possible tax. Even Winston Churchill admitted as much until someone seems to have had a chat with him about the basis of wealth for the English upper classes.
if these owners are still there, it seems you'll first have to overcome that hurdle, unless they've become convinced that georgism is best for everyone in the meantime.
Big land owners will never be convinced to give up income they get from doing nothing but owning land. That much is impossible.
The real key is getting individual house owners to see that they would be better off paying a land value tax instead of income tax and sales tax.
I couldn't have said it any better. We need a new paradigm.
We still have the 70% who believe that they don't deserve to live without struggle.
Interesting that the most-liked comment here still regards the idea that "people have gotten lazy" (paraphrased).
The old idea dies hard. The one that says that your worth is tied to your productivity, and that the "problem" is that people got used to not working.
As I've said many times, the world is full of Einstein's that are tied up washing dishes or sitting at desks bored to tears. If everyone was allowed to do and had the freedom to do what they are best at, we would transform our planet.
But unfortunately most of those people are too busy trying to survive. And maybe it will take a time period where people get to just BE, and heal, and discover who they are.
Then everyone can be "productive" in their own way -- a way that doesn't necessarily satisfy an exploitative capitalist.
And if what this guy said isn't the perfect example of a caste system and ideology, then I don't know what is.
I agree with your assessment of the hard-working nature of Americans, but I disagree that so many think they deserve to be worked to their deaths (my phrasing.) I know this space is overwhelmingly free of red/blue bs, but as a class-based leftist in a 70% red county in Georgia, I'd say my neighbors know that how things are going now are NOT okay and NOT deserved. Yes many buy the deflection to immigrants argument, but most people I know are quite upset by the wage situation nowadays. And the lack of benefits, or affordable benefits, and especially the cost of living, especially food. Working class people who don't follow the news instinctively know they're getting conned. Again I apologize for bringing in red/blue bs, but I want to defend my fellow Georgians and Southerners, because the mainstream stereotypes are wrong. It's almost hilarious how the least "informed" per establishment criteria are actually the most aware that the entire establishment is corrupt.
I appreciate your thoughts.
My intent was to jump way ahead and speak to the acceptance of the nationalist/democracy/capitalism mindset that most people here accept as the only choice of our reality in this country. The idea that this system is just off-track and can be righted.
Most people never consider that there are many other options to existence, and that we could explore those if we weren't so busy trying to survive in a corrupted system that we think we can fix.
I offer my compassion and empathy to all of us.
And a call to look beyond what we have been sold. It doesn't have to be this way.
Amen
Right on, Caitlin. This is why I am a Marxist. People like Gurner and the rest of his class are the enemies of workers the world over. They need to remember what happened in the French and Russian Revolutions and will happen again.
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” - J. Krishnamurti
"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media". - Noam Chomsky
"In Lak'ech Ala K'in" "I am you and you are me. What I do to you I do to myself." Mayan Saying
I will keep this short and simple. The notion that employers shouldn't feel lucky to have workers means that they see labor having little to no value. Yet without labor, they wealthy don't profit. So when inflation goes up rarely do we see wages rising anywhere near the inflation, because wages have no cost of living adjustment for the majority of people.
Next, the concept of having employees experiencing economic pain on the level beyond the Americian great depression is insane. Worse than medieval oppression and essentially a point to legalize slavery or literally indentured servitude through debt. The wealthy feel entitled to their wealth and ability to oppress people. I wonder how many days they could work in their own sweatshops or assembly lines being paid what those people are living on. They forget that they steal money from workers, they didn't earn most of it.
When the reckoning comes, be discerning; the one who invents a better mouse trap then employs people who manufacture them should not be thought of as deserving the same as people who trade paper or trade people.
And how exactly has this self-important princeling measured the level of laziness among the working class? Has he ever talked with a worker? His saying all this BS is strictly for The Fraternity and like a red herring to steer away any considerations for government stipulated price freezes to halt the greed induced rise in foodstuff prices.
Basically the slaves need to be reminded who their masters are.
We need to turn that around. Yesterday. FFS.
AMEN. Fluck their free boxed lunches.
Billionaires are allowed and encouraged to exist for their the same reason kings allowed aristocrats to exist. They help enforce the ideology that the many exist to support a few.
Romans were clear about this and simply designated people as slaves, while allowing some slaves and other people of their assimilated cultures to work hard enough for the empire to become wealthy, themselves, though never, or rarely, could they attain ruling class status.
This creates the illusion that the class-based system is merit-based, which helps reinforce compliance among the many who remain and will remain poor, because they believe they could potentially escape their lower class status.
Someone clever once said that working class Americans voted for Republicans (Reagan’s Republicans) because they saw themselves not as poor, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
Similarity, the British ‘reform’ of the parliamentary system was necessary, because as modernity led many to eschew religious promises of an opulent afterlife as payment for a life of good work and poverty, they needed a new illusion to govern the working classes. Otherwise, why instead of getting rid completely of the peerage system and house of lords, did they simply allow the PM to elevate some imperial boffins to peer status?
However, how many Republicans, ie those who want the monarchy abolished, are tapped in this way?
"temporarily embarrassed millionaires" It's a paraphrase of John Steinbeck from the 1930's.
While pondering the state of the world during the summer of 2020, my old neighbour here in NW Italy observed then that “according to the wealthy, when the owner had a Mercedes and the worker a (Fiat) 500, the balance was correct but, now that the worker can have also have a Mercedes, the balance is wrong.”
Pretty sharp, I’d say…!