8: The Lower Classes
8: Separation of Society into Classes
When we had our natural law society in Pastland, no one owned the land so no one owned the wealth it produced. It was bountiful and produced very large ‘free rice flows’ that led to very large ‘free cash flows.’ No one owned this free money. We shared it in some way we agreed upon in meetings and elections.
In the system built on territorial sovereignty, many parcels don’t produce any free cash flows at all, because the people who own them don’t know how to operate them well enough to make this happen. Some parcels do produce free cash flows.
Some farmers can make enough that they don’t have to work at all. They can hire people to do the work and will have enough left over to support their families. Some will be able to support themselves and their families comfortably, but will not have enough money to make investments.
A very few will have enough to support their families and invest in additional land.
Their holdings will grow.
As their holdings grow, their free cash flows grow. The surpluses they have to invest, above the amount they need to take care of their families, will increase. They can invest more and more.
At some point, some of these people will have such enormous incomes they can do more than just support themselves in comfort, they can hire servants to minister to their every need.
Societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty naturally divide the people in them into three basic classifications, creating three ‘classes’ of people.
The class at the top consists of the people who own large amounts of cash-flow producing land. They get income without doing anything.
The class at the bottom owns no land at all. They get nothing unless they work.
Sometimes there is a class in the middle. These people have enough of an ownership stake in the means of production that they can support themselves, but don’t have any significant amounts to invest.
Population
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote a book that is now considered to be the seminal work on the relationship between labor, wages, and population levels. The book is called ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population.’ (You can find the full text of this book on the PossibleSocieties.com website.)
It discusses the basic realities of existence for one classification of humans, the ‘working class.’
These people have no investments to generate income for them. Their entire income comes from wages. They depend on wages so the factors that determine wages determine what kinds of lives they will have. If wages are low, they will suffer. If wages are high, they will live well.
Malthus claims that the main factor that determines wages is the relationship between the supply of workers (the number of people who need to work to stay alive) and the demand for labor (the number of workers that the owners are willing to hire). If the supply of workers goes up, but the demand for workers does not go up, wages must go down.
What determines the supply of workers?
Normally, this depends on the population of the working class.
If the working class population increases, but the demand for workers does not increase, wages will fall.
Malthus points out that people have very strong desires to have sex. They will give in to these desires. Without birth control, sex leads to babies.
People have powerful incentives to figure out ways to have sex without pregnancy and all cultures appear to have had some methods to make this happen. Certain plants can reduce fertility a great deal and condoms can be made out of animal intestines. Although some methods existed at the time Malthus wrote, the poor often couldn’t afford them. (This is still true today.)
Parents have instinctual pressures to take care of their offspring. They will take care of their children and keep them healthy if they can. If food is plentiful, conditions healthy, and there is no birth control, one woman can easily have 8 or more children that survive to breeding age themselves. In other words, if food is plentiful and conditions healthy (for people in the working class), the population can grow fantastically fast. It can quadruple each generation.
Malthus pointed out that this can lead to something that modern scholars call a ‘population explosion.’ Population grows at what Malthus called a ‘geometric rate.’ (This is also called an ‘exponential rate’ and is the same rate of growth of the chemical and nuclear reactions we call ‘explosions’)
Malthus pointed out that if wages were high enough to support the babies, the population would explode (grow geometrically) and the supply of workers would also explode.
The food supply would not explode, however.
The reasons for this are practical: There is only a certain amount of land available to grow food. The best land is already in use. New land can be pressed into service, but this process happens at what Malthus called a ‘linear rate.’ A linear progression will always be slower than a geometric progression. This means that the food supply can never grow as fast as the population.
The Maximum State of Misery Short of Death
Malthus explains the results. The population of the working class will grow rapidly if conditions allow the workers to take care of their children. The supply of workers will grow faster than demand and wages will fall.
As wages fall, the workers living conditions will fall. With more demand for food, people (of all classes) will buy more. But the supply of food won’t keep up with the demand and food prices will have to rise.
This will affect everyone, but it won’t cause starvation for the upper or middle class. These people will not be able to live as well, but they will not be forced to allow their children to suffer. Many members of the working class won’t be able to afford enough to give their children a healthy diet. Their health will suffer. If wages continue to fall, eventually they won’t be able to afford enough fuel, clothing, or even the most basic medical care. Eventually, the working class will live in such great poverty that most of their children don’t survive to breeding age.
At some point, the working class will be living in such miserable conditions that its population will stabilize. It won’t be able to grow because the people literally won’t be able to feed their babies enough to keep them healthy.
Malthus claimed that this is the only way that wages can stop falling.
He claimed that wages can never be higher than the level that will support families in the ‘the maximum level of misery short of death’ for very long.
Malthus is one of many who have looked at this issue. Another person who provided great insight into the nature of population growth is Charles Darwin. Both of these researchers noted that population levels tended to explode (grow at an exponential rate) if resources are available. But both noted two exceptions in this rule:
The first involved humans who were in the upper class. These people had access to opportunities to control birth that lower class people didn’t have and appeared to take advantage of these opportunities. Upper class women had a lot of options about ways to spend their time. They didn’t appear to want to spend their lives taking care of enormous broods and they didn’t have to. The population of upper classes therefore tended to remain constant. This basically means that the women had, on average, the 2 children per woman needed to replace themselves and their spouses.
The second exception involved natural law societies. Both researchers noted that the standard rules that applied in the societies of Europe, Asia, and Africa, didn’t appear to apply to the societies of the Americas. For some reason, the societies of the Americas tended to have far lower population growth levels than those in Europe.
Why does this happen?
We don’t have a lot of research in this area. People who have speculated on the reason have speculated that it involves security. The members of the upper classes in sovereignty-based societies, and all people in natural law societies have security: they know that they will still be able to eat when they get sick and old, even if they can’t work full-time anymore. They don’t need children to support them in their old age or fill in to get an income when they are sick. They can base their reproduction on other factors. If they want fewer babies, they can take advantage of natural medicines that have been shown to reduce fertility. (Darwin points out that the natives of America used various techniques, including natural medicines, to control birth.)
He claims this is the natural condition of the working class. There may be times when the working class does not live in misery for a short time, but natural forces create a cyclical pressure that will always bring them back to this natural condition.
If their misery eases for a time, for any reason, they will take care of their children. The population will begin to grow at its natural rate (geometric, the same rate as an explosion). Within a generation, the wages will start to fall again. They can only stop falling when the living conditions of the working class fall back to their natural level, ‘the maximum state of misery short of death.’
The Other Classes
The members of top level class get plentiful free incomes. The rich get richer. The more riches you start with, the more you will have to invest. Investment returns come in as a percentage of the amount invested (we will look at this in more detail later) so the more you start with, the more investment returns you get (the free cash flow is an ‘investment return’) and the faster you get richer.
The people with large investment returns can get more land two different ways. A simple way to get land is to buy it. They have money and people need money.
But not everyone who has land will want to sell.
In fact, only the poorest will do this: they will be forced to sell because the alternative is death.
The class we often call the ‘middle class’ will have enough. They will not sell.
But the conditions of this society are not stable for the people in this class. Their situation is precarious. Some will have large families. Their farms will be divided among the heirs. If the original farm was barely able to support a family, the new smaller farms will be below the threshold. A farm that would be fine to support a single family won’t be able to support four families (after a generation) or sixteen families (after two generations) or sixty four families (after three generations). The owners of these very small farms will be forced to sell. The large farms will get bigger.
Eventually, they will be very large. We often use different terms to refer to very large farms and call them ‘estates’ (these are the forerunners of the entities called ‘states,’ discussed below). The owners of these estates will have many employees. Some of the employees will deal with problems that we would expect to find in any system where there are very poor people and very rich people: the poor will try to steal from the rich to feed their families. These employees will need to have access to organized force to do their jobs. (If there is no organized group to oppose them, the bandits and thieves will organize themselves and take what they want. The estate owners have to control enough force to prevent this.)
The owners of the large states will have militaries. The owners of the very large estates will have to have quite large militaries.
The people who run the estates can put pressure on the owners of the relatively small farms to sell, even if these people don’t want to sell. If you watch the old westerns on television or in movies, you will see that this is a common theme:
A ‘land baron’ wants land owned by a smaller farmer. He offers to buy but the farmer doesn’t sell. The baron then uses various techniques to force the farmer off of his land. He kills the livestock, burns the crops, contaminates the water supply, he even (in some of the movies and shows) burns down the barn or home of the farmer or takes the loved ones of the farmer hostage. In the movies and TV shows there is always some good guy that comes along to protect the farmer (a ‘high plains drifter’ or a ‘lone ranger’). By the end of the show, the land baron has been defeated and/or killed, and the farmer lives happily ever after. But in the real world, the people trying to take the land eventually get it. As a practical matter, small farms are going to disappear.
As this happens, society turns from a ‘three class society’ into a ‘two class society.’
The owners of the estates are the upper class.
They live like kings (they will become kings in time, as we will see); they have enormous incomes with no need to work.
The ‘workers’ live, as Malthus said, in ‘the maximum state of misery short of death.’
Countries
Natural law societies have no need for the entities we call ‘countries’ or ‘governments.’ This seems to be so difficult to believe that people from societies that had countries seemed to prefer to believe that the people in these societies were could not be true human beings, because true humans need to be ‘governed.’ We need to be divided into groups with a ruling body or individual ruler directing our activities. Bartolomé de Las Casas noted the extreme lengths to which people would go to deny that it is possible for humans to live in a world without countries or governments:
The ultimate cause for writing this work was to gain knowledge of all the many nations of this vast new world. They had been defamed by persons who feared neither God nor the charge, so grievous before divine judgment, of defaming men and causing them to lose esteem and honor.
It has been written that these peoples of the Indies, lacking ordered nations and structured governments, did not have the power of reason to govern themselves. In order to demonstrate the truth, which is the opposite, this book brings together and compiles natural, special and accidental causes which are specified below. Not only have the Americans [natives] shown themselves to be very wise peoples and possessed of lively and marked understanding, prudently governing and providing for their people and making them prosper in justice; but they have equaled many diverse nations of the world, past and present, that have been praised for their governance, politics and customs; and exceed by no small measure the wisest of all these, such as the Greeks and Romans.
This advantage and superiority, along with everything said above, will appear quite clearly when the Americans are compared with Europeans. This history has been written with the aforesaid aim in mind by Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, a monk of the Dominican Order and bishop of Chiapa, who promises before the divine word that everything said and referred to is the truth, and that nothing of an untruthful nature appears to the best of his knowledge.
Countries and governments appear spontaneously in societies built on sovereign control of parts of planets. There are two forms these countries and governments can take.
The first is the form of a monarchy. Owners of large estates will have control of all the wealth of these estates. A large part of this wealth is free wealth that flows from the land. (Represented by the free cash flow in societies that use money for transactions.) There will be a lot of people around who don’t own any land and would like to get some of this free wealth. There will be wandering thieves or bandits who raid their land and take what they can. Neighboring estates may take advantage of any failure to protect livestock or stores of food by simply taking them. The owners have to take various measures to protect themselves and their property. They will need some sort of armed security force, a ‘military’ or ‘police’ force, for serious threats.
Once they have a military, they can use it for anything they want. The owners may make rules and use their military/police to force people on their estate to follow these rules. They can make any kind of rules they want. Many people with this power have made rules requiring people to kow-tow when they pass. This basically means to get on their knees and bang their heads on the ground. To enforce this, the owners may issue orders for their military to decapitate any who aren’t obeying with the proper amount of enthusiasm.
This part of the book is about societies built on the concept of sovereignty, an absolute and total kind of ownership and control. The word ‘sovereignty’ comes from the rights claimed and exercised by people called ‘sovereigns.’ The owners of the estates control all of the food and wealth. They can decide who eats and who does not eat. They can make any rules and require everyone to follow them. They can be sovereigns. They can claim they have sovereignty over everything that happens on the land that is in their estate and everyone on it. They can say that their property is not an ‘estate’ but a ‘state,’ the word that was used until recently to refer to the entities we now call ‘countries.’
Governments
Bodies that ‘govern’ are optional in natural law societies.
When we had the natural law society in Pastland, our group could choose to create a body that would have the power to ‘govern’ us if we wanted to do this.
But we didn’t have to have one. Our system could operate perfectly well without one.
Territorial sovereignty societies operate differently. They can’t function without governments. The main reason for this is that they need taxes.
Recall that our natural law society in Pastland didn’t have and didn’t need taxes. No one owned the land so no one owned the things it produced. We collected this wealth and used it as we wished. Part went to pay the people who helped in production. This left the ‘operating profits.’ Part of the operating profits went to pay the people who planned and organized production (in the case of the Pastland Farm, only one person, Kathy). This left the free cash flow, representing the bounty of this land. The land was very bountiful so an enormous amount of free cash flowed from it. We used part of this wealth to pay for common services. We could have used it all, providing all services for everyone. (For example, all meals could have been communal and free.) But we realized that people have different preferences and want sufferer things so we only paid for the specific services that everyone needed and could be provided more efficiently if provided for everyone. After paying for these services, we had a large amount of money left over. We divided this money among all people who met the basic requirements for social, personal, and environmental responsibility.
You can find hundreds of different books explaining the realities of natural law societies in various places, with dozens available directly from the PossibleSocieties.com website. I have read all the books listed on this website and hundreds of other documents about natural law societies and can’t find any record of any that had taxes. Taxes are not necessary in natural law societies. The people could have them if they wanted, but since the harm the system (they punish people for working hard and being efficient) they did not want them and didn’t impose them.
Part Four explains a hybrid system that is a kind of mixture between natural law societies and territorial sovereignty societies called a ‘socratic.’ Socratic societies don’t need taxes either and probably won’t have them.
Everything is owned in territorial sovereignty societies. This means nothing is left unowned to pay for common services. Territorial sovereignty societies need a great many more common services than natural law societies. The most important of these services is a military. Since territorial sovereignty societies are built on excluding the majority (the people from outside the border are always a majority) from rights that are claimed by a minority (the people inside the lines are always a minority of the human race), they can’t operate without a military. They must use force to prevent the people they are trying to keep from benefiting from the land from crossing the borders. Since the people who are trying to cross can get together into organized groups and use force, the people who run the country must be able to use greater force. They must have a military and it must be quite large.
Territorial sovereignty societies need a lot of national income to pay their expenses. These needs can become enormous during times of war.
Since they need taxes, they need another kind of body, a kind of internal army normally called ‘police.’ The government will assess taxes but some people will not want to pay them. No one can be allowed to get away with this: if anyone could get away with not paying, people would all want to be in that number and taxes would be so difficult to collect as to be impossible. The authorities that collect taxes just be able to take them, even if the people who are supposed to be paying don’t want to pay. If the people who owe the taxes resist with force, the taxing authorities must be able to bring in superior force. If the people who owe the taxes escalate, requiring the government to kill them to get its money (as in ‘you will get your taxes over my dead body’) the government must have the ability to use deadly force to remove the people from the equation so they can than confiscate the money.
If an organization has the right to take anything you have away from you (by calling it a ‘tax’), using any level of force required and even killing you if this is necessary, you don’t control it. This organization controls you.
What Is A Government?
In the schools of territorial sovereignty societies, children are taught that their governments are instrument of ‘we the people’ that is used to do whatever ‘the people’ want. It is a tool to turn their collective desires and needs into reality.
But, when we leave school and enter the real world, we find that this is not what governments do. Black’s Law Dictionary (the acknowledged authority on legal definitions) defines ‘government’ this way:
The regulation, restraint, supervision, or control which is exercised upon the individual members of an organized jural society by those invested with the supreme political authority or the act of exercising supreme political power or control.
Note that a government is not defined as ‘a body that provides services for the people.’
This is the definition of a ‘service provider,’ not a government.
It is not defined as ‘a tool that turns the will of the people into reality.’ In fact, the countries that are consistently presented as models of democracy don’t even have tools that can be used to determine what ‘we the people’ want to happen, let alone turn it into reality.
The United States teaches school children that the people of the past of this country have fought many wars to protect something they call ‘their democracy.’ The wars will continue and these children will be required to make sacrifices for them. At the very least, they will have to give a percentage of all income they generate to the government, which will use to keep the war machine going. They may be asked to send their sons and daughters to the war of the day (whatever it is; the human race is in so many wars it is hard to keep track) and possibly give up their sanity (a very large percentage of solders who go to war come back with serious mental problems), their limbs, or their lives. They are fighting for democracy. If they die, they must be proud to have died for such a wonderful cause.
But is this really a democracy?
Not a single national issue in United States history has been decided by an election of the people. (Some states allow some things to be decided by the people, but no federal issues have ever been voted on by ‘we the people.’ ) But people vote for the people who run the federal government don’t they?
In fact, only one of these people is even subjected to any kind of vote at all, and the vote for this one person is not an election, it is a non-binding poll that will be used by officials in the political party to determine which of the states party officials will select the people called the ‘electors,’ who will actually vote for the president. All electors are party partisans, bound to vote as the party directs them (if they vote against party lines, they can be removed and their votes disqualified.)
Nearly half of the time, the candidate that ‘wins’ got less votes than the ‘loser.’ In other words, the will of the people has the same influence on the actual results as would the flipping of a coin.
Since no federal issues have ever been submitted to the people, and the only thing that is even called an ‘election’ is not binding, there has never been a popular election of any kind in the United States that determined anything. Yet this is somehow held up to children and the world as the supreme example of democracy, something that the people must make any sacrifice asked of them to preserve. What, exactly, are they fighting to preserve?
The best way to see that the territorial sovereignty systems called ‘democracies’ are not democratic is to compare them to truly democratic systems. Part Three explains a socratic system. In that system, the people allocate wealth in binding elections to programs they want funded. If the people don’t want it to exist, it won’t get funding and won’t exist. Part Four goes over a broad range of possible societies. It shows that some societies both need and want governments, some don’t need them but will probably want them, and some neither need or want them. When you understand the different options, you will see that societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty have the most powerful forces pushing toward the need for government of any type of society possible.
Governments are bodies that control the people.
Territorial sovereignty societies must have governments.
They can’t function without them.
Different Kinds of Governments
Because governments make the decisions, it is important to understand that the entities called ‘governments’ have needs and desires that differ a great deal from the needs and desires of the human race as a whole (which the governments of ‘independent and sovereign states’ don’t even normally consider) and be dramatically different than the needs and desires of the people who live in the countries.
If there is a conflict, the governments will do the things that meet the needs of the governments, and ignore the needs and desires of the people.
….this chapter under construction, more to follow (please read on)