The Degeneration of Aristocracy and Market Economy

John Marshall writes:

In a normal society, the forces of culture flow from above, middle, and below. There can be no culture as such absent the aristos, those immemorial familial forces that promote the permanent values and the higher mores of the society. From below we often see what is passionate, most easily accessible, and what is more of “sentiment”. From the middle, what is practical. But nobility must come from that sphere where self-sacrifice and honor are the rules of order.

In the modern materialist society, culture is manufactured by corporate interests. Culture is literally a “product” to be sold in the market.The industrial powers will argue that they follow the desires of the people, rather than lead them. If this were so, then advertising would be an afterthought, existing merely to differentiate among competitors. But this is the least function of advertising, for, as anyone who has spent time in a corporate boardroom can attest, advertising exists as much to generate demand as to service it, it exists as much to create new markets as to provide products and services for existing ones. Industrial capitalism (that 19th through 21st century historical phenomenon), as economist Wilhelm Ropke would insist, is not cognate with the market economy, which precedes it. It is a degeneration of the market economy into subsidy and monopoly, and a degeneration of the moral vitality upon which the market economy relies. Capitalism cannot remain stagnant, it must increase or recede. Industrial capitalism (marked by the emergence of the public corporation that serves the interests of the anonymous “shareholder") is necessarily expansionist and imperialist. And anything that must expand to survive, cannot be healthy. more >>