2006-05-17 The Other Foe of Free Enterprise

2006-05-17 David Brin Libertarian Reform Caucus \political ideology\archive.org/links\aristocratism\free enterprise http://web.archive.org/web/20071009064836/www.reformthelp.org/rights/generalizing/foe.php The Other Foe of Free Enterprise The Other Foe of Free Enterprise  ''The previous piece in this series is The Grand American Consensus. This is part 4 of 4.'' Obsessed as we've been for seventy years with a bumbling socialist malignity to the East, it's easy to overlook historical evidence that populist revolutionary movements seldom keep steam, however militant their beginnings. Few market systems have been permanently ruined by proletarian or peasant uprisings. A great many, on the other hand, have been destroyed by another nemesis of free enterprise... aristocratism.

Examples range from those already mentioned, to classical Greece, Rome, and Imperial Britain. Each experienced brief epochs when individuals competed somewhat fairly, providing goods and services, leveraging labor through innovation, and creating greater wealth for all. In every case, the same thing happened. A class of enterprising leaders would rise, proud to have done so by their own efforts. But once in power, they conspired to close what had been open, to change the rules so that newcomers would find the same climb harder.

If free markets benefit from one aspect of human nature – honest ambition – they also seem disastrously vulnerable to a darker side of that same trait. Not so much greed, per se, as a tendency to cheat. The aristocratic impulse drives self-made men to use the wealth and power they've attained, to arrange for their sons to start out life as owners, nobles... demi-gods. Choose any epoch to see examples. Coups by the Roman patrician class. Civil service rigor-mortis in Chi'ing China. The pattern grows out of a very strong side of human nature. Complete text: David Brin/The Other Foe of Free Enterprise

&ldquo;Few market systems have been permanently ruined by proletarian or peasant uprisings. A great many, on the other hand, have been destroyed by another nemesis of free enterprise... aristocratism.&rdquo;   