18th Century France and 21st Century China
Like the pre-Revolutionary French, China’s middle and working classes and farmers have no experience at all with political liberty and the practical realities of self-government. China’s central government has managed to liberate its people’s spectacular economic energies while retaining political control of China’s macro economy, chiefly by retaining government ownership and control of the Chinese money and banking system.
As the all-powerful fiscal administration of pre-Revolutionary France demonstrates, financial government of a nation’s economic life is “effective” government of the nation. The Chinese government has not given up its most potent macroeconomic power, its ownership and control of its money system.
Western Political Liberty vs. Chinese Economic Liberty
Though it is comforting for Westerners to believe that political liberty generates and satisfactorily distributes economic wealth by some natural automatic process, it is not clear that Western “political” liberty is much more than an impotent veil obscuring the people’s view of who is “really” governing their nation. Does the financial and industrial corporate sector administratively govern the nation’s monetary and economic life to serve their private interests? Or do the people’s elected representatives govern the nation’s macro economy to serve the general public’s interests? This is not a rhetorical question.
The 1789 Revolution, de Tocqueville observes, overthrew the by then hollow political forms of the ancien regime, while leaving the nation’s real centralized administrative structure intact. All that remained was for a Napoleon to step into the vacant form of political authority and declare himself Emperor, commanding the already radically centralized administrative system.
China is proving that wealth can be generated by fostering economic liberty within a politically unfree system, and that social stability can be maintained by retaining government ownership of their macroeconomic control system, their money system.
Meanwhile large swaths of the American and European “people”, the politically powerless peasantry, are being evicted from their mortgaged homes and cast into unemployment exacerbated by an official policy of “austerity”, all for the sake of trying to salvage the insolvent ruin of their arithmetically impossible privately owned money systems (a for profit money system that issues all its money as loan principal, but charges debt as principal + interest, systematically creates more monetary debt than it creates money to pay that debt; the process culminates in systemic debt default and banking system insolvency as we see today in Europe and America).
21st Century Deja Vu
So it is not clear that these modern Western roadkills of elite-serving political policy enjoy any more real political liberty than did 18th century French peasants. Whereas the Chinese government has been taking significant steps towards improving the lot of their peasantry, including job creating economic and fiscal policies, and provision of government health care and pensions. Who serves the people, is ruled by the people’s interests. Actions and outcomes, not vacuous democratic platitudes or empty political forms, are the true test of “responsible” government.
No More Rugged Frontiers
The world is no longer a frontier where rugged individuals can stride into the wilderness and lay claim to a plot of timberland upon which to hack out their independent fortune. The world is all owned now, and there are no free frontiers upon which to practice individual liberty. Giant corporations, not independent individuals, own industries and produce most of the consumer goods, including food. All land use is subject to highly restrictive zoning laws (often demanded by gentrified neighbors, not “the government”) and all land is taxed. Taxes are payable “in money”, so even the most self sufficient backwoodsman cannot escape working within “the system” to get money.
There is no “place” anymore for liberty loving peasants to strike out “to”. Not unless they are already rich enough to buy land and set themselves up to earn some money to buy needed equipment and pay taxes. So either they are acknowledged within the system and their economic interests are politically accommodated, or else they have no more reason for civil obedience than did the disaffected French peasants who rampaged through the decade of The Terror.
Apres Moi Le Deluge
Ironically, the relaxed taxation and loudly broadcast elite concern for the French peasantry during the reign of Louis XVI (1774 – 1792) is what finally brought the silent seething of peasant rage to a hard boil. de Tocqueville surmises that where their plight had been bearable during the decades and centuries when there was clearly nothing that could be done about it, as soon as the new spirit of liberte, egalite, fraternite had fastened itself into the French worldview the peasants saw a chance for relief. And they took it, with a vengeance.
Louis XVI had also embarked on substantial public works in the two decades before the Revolution, and at the same time private investment and industry flourished. de Tocqueville does not mention the connection: that money spent by the government becomes incomes in the hands of the contractors and others who receive the spending as their earnings, which increases general prosperity as the incomes are spent or invested again and again in the general spirit of optimistic affluence. But here again it was often peasant lands, labor and resources that were expropriated for private and public industrial and infrastructure development. So once again the peasantry was disembarked from the gravy train, if not run over by it.
de Tocqueville certainly notes the insecurity of creditors to the “stimulus spending” government, which creditors waited for their contract payments for goods and services rendered, or their interest payments for money loaned, and despaired of ever recovering their principal. Sovereign debtors of that era routinely stiffed their creditors.
As increasing numbers of modern Western middle class citizens fall into the ranks of dispossessed peasants, blithely unrelieved by government policy of bailing out banks rather than bailing out bank debtors, while the ranks of wealthy elites get richer, the conditions are germinated for revolt against unrepresentative government.
