Dateline 1500 AD: Church; monarchs; aristocrats; snitches
Rebels in those days created secret societies to fight The Man.
Dateline 2025 AD: Aristocrats; NGOs; national governments; propagandists
Rebels these days network on social media and attend deep-state controlled rallies and protests
Underdogs of the world have for years been lauding the collapse of the British Empire and the decline and fall of America. Every country on the planet with significant resources or a strategic location has been under the yoke of colonialists, with slavery as its ugliest manifestation. The Global South is celebrating its ascendancy and its opportunity to finally put the boots to the bullying marauders of the Western world, but are they a bit premature? Are the rundown isles and infrastructure of Britain all that remains of the largest empire the world has ever seen, or are they just the skin of a snake that has been cast off because it is no longer needed? Is the museum that holds the record of past glories just the husk, an empty shell? Where have the empire builder families gone and what has happened to their great wealth? Ask the parasitic middlemen—the lawyers, accountants, bankers and insurers (wealth transfer specialists) who were tasked with redeploying British assets. Ask the quants! Or read the Panama Papers. Industrialization fattens the sheep. The wolves eat the sheep and grow fat. Industry is ditched for finance.
Along comes a new generation of wannabe elites. They identify software, media and information as growth industries. Free goodies show up that shock the young people: Internet, social media, video games, poker and cryptocurrencies—games with huge potential access to which they could never have imagined in their wildest dreams would be allowed let alone offered gratis. So, they play, and they win for a while and then the quants go to work. And the kids start losing. Capitalism stands for free markets and survival of the fittest. It works pretty efficiently to meet those needs… for a while. Eventually, however, through both honest and dishonest competition (mergers and acquisitions, creating protective associations, dumping and selling below cost, colluding on price, dark pools and dark nets, use of analytics and algorithms we do not have access to, etc.), power consolidates in the hands of a few players. That is one of the biggest problems with modern supposedly free market democracy: how to the stop collusion and corruption that destroy the poor and protect the strong. . . . to be continued
