| HN Mirror

We could split a lot of hairs in this topic and still never agree on a common set of premises.

Much of history has seen only two classes: the people who own everything; and the people who own nothing, who then pay rent/tribute/tax/scutage/royalty/duty/whatever to the ownership class.

By some combination of popular rebellions and mercantile guild/cartel strong-arming, those who did valuable skilled labor were able to pry some ownership away for themselves, forming the middle class. The protections for the ownership of the middle class had to be very broad, in order to keep the apprentices from being taken back by the owner-class, and so the non-owner class was able to use them, too. Some of them, anyway. It helped to be white and European.

Then we had a three-class system: owns-most, owns-some, and non-owners. The middle class had to use law and custom as a means of protecting itself from the upper class, for whom all standards of personal conduct are negotiable. So the middles slowly bent the cage of law around even (some) kings and queens, keeping their cartel strong by violently punishing the renegades. They even founded their own nations. For themselves, mainly. Not for everybody.

At this point, it could still be argued that the middle class was simply trying to push out the old aristocracy and become the new owns-everything class. The vote was only granted to land-owner males, at first. And maybe around now a conquering army comes by and wipes out the democracy's fresh prosperity, so the emperor/king/shah/khan/caliph/voivode/whomever can take ownership of all the stuff. But maybe also the defense succeeds, and the owns-some manage to fight off the owns-most.

Now there's a choice. Draw a new line, and become the new owns-everything class, or recruit the owns-nothing and have just a single owns-some class for everyone, where no one is above the law, and everyone has something to lose if they try to reneg against the cartel. A man with nothing to lose and nothing to gain has no incentive to obey the law. But with carrots on one side and sticks on the other, everyone can be convinced to operate by rule of law. And this strategem was finally realized in the US after the civil rights movement, when finally, as a matter of law, everyone had nominally equal status, even though the white people had a loooong head start on accumulating all their property.

Then, in the late-1970s/early-1980s, the richest in the US started making a break for it. They cut their own cartel fees to a fraction of what they formerly owed, and cleared some runway in the direction of being the new owns-everything class. They formed corporations to be their personal dictatorships, attacked unions, depressed wages, and made political influence a purchasable commodity--which they then began to purchase more of. And this time around, they have decided to make ideas and culture ownable properties. If they are allowed, they will end up owning entire planets, dwarf planets, and other named celestial objects, and the walls keeping the serfs on the land will equal the depth of the gravity well.

If, for a hypothetical example, Elon Musk openly stabs someone to death in the main habitation tunnel of the Mars colony built with his cash, how would he be held accountable, given that the company he owns could possibly retaliate by cancelling all future support missions? The jurisdiction of the US does not extend that far. The mechanism would have to be built into the organizational structure of the SpaceX corporation (and to my knowledge, it is not). Would it be any better, if he told someone else to do the murder for him, or else have their water and oxygen rations cut off? You can't enforce the rules of the cartel-of-laws, unless you have leverage over potential renegades.