Finance v. Malthus

[by Lynn C. Rees]

Listening to episodes of The History of England Podcast umpteen times as I code Java, TypeScript, *, &tc., I’ve heard host David Crowther (a “bloke in a shed”) make the point umpteen times that the primary job of a king of occupied Britain was to keep a firm hand on his barons. And what was the secret of successful kingly baronial management?

Evenhanded distribution of political patronage.

This Crowtherism appeals to me. A central pillar of my crackpottery is a personal rule of thumb I’ve flogged nearly umpteen times: politics is the division of power. You know you’re nigh unto umpteen when the POLITICS IS THE DIVISION OF POWER t-shirt goes on sale. We’re not there yet. Once more unto the umpteenth, dear friends, once more.

Patronage is always a significant share of any activity involved in dividing power, which is to say a significant share of all activity involving mankind. Like politics, death, or taxes, patronage is an inescapable marker of mortality. An almost as ineradicable characteristic of mortal man is a belief that patronage in its many guises can be dispensed with altogether, usually by tilting the division of power in favor of the right sort of bloke. A bloke, of course, whose primary qualification is that he agrees with us. And will (sotto voce) give we who uphold his right sortedness a greater division of power than the wrong sorted. Anyone who claims they can create a society made up of mortal men free of patronage or of its common subspecies like cronyism, redistribution, logrolling, &tc. is either a fool, a knave, or, worse, both. You don’t choose not have patronage: in making such an attempt, you merely choose another diversion for patronage.

Significant patronage is always diverted into the hands of barons. All flavors of power, however gradually, fall to those hands which most convincingly turn it into violent power. Baronial hands tend to be hands practiced (or regularly embraced by hands practiced) in the art of converting other forms of power into specifically violent power. Power is fungible: it can, with varying ease, be shifted from one form of power to another. “Purely” economic power, for example, is violent power in embryo. Inevitability will convert it into violent power, either sooner by incumbent baronial hands or, later, at the hands of barons who expropriate it from them.

Page 1 of 2 | Next page