Once Upon a Time….Mankind was Nearly Shorn of its Shackles. Yes, it’s always been the 1% vs. the 99%.

Once upon a time the world was owned and controlled by kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and absolute rulers. There were the ruling elites, the upper class, the propertied class, the moneyed class, the educated class, the bureaucratic class and everybody else was a serf of sorts and expected to be compliant slaves – that’s what slaves do, they serve their masters. Such was the fate of humanity for thousands of years. The 1% and the 99% have existed for as long as humans have existed.

The ancient Greeks experimented with democracy and the ancient Romans introduced the republic (embraced by America’s founding fathers to minimize state power) but for the most part folks were not deemed to have any rights.

Then the unthinkable happened. In Europe, Western Civilization was born as folks started to clamor for political rights, property rights and natural rights. Monarchies began to topple, theocratic powers were usurped and the revolution for human liberty began. Although Europe was a bloodbath on and off for nearly a millennium, the great political theorists and intellectual challengers who conceived and fought to implement such foreign concepts as non-repressive forms of government and individual sovereignty finally succeeded. Eventually, limited personal freedoms and rights translated into much wider economic freedoms which elevated industry and trade while spawning an economically strong middle class.

Throughout the process, we all learned that the vast human potential so inherent in the minds and souls of free thinking human beings is, ultimately, the only catalyst for progress and civilization, without which there can no civilizations, at least none worth noticing or experiencing. Greatness and human liberation are soul mates.

To be sure, the road from human serfdom was long and bloody and there were territorial wars, civil wars, religious wars (some of the bloodiest of all wars) and the wars fought for conquest and empire. As Europe was a chronic bloodbath, many feisty folks just packed up and headed across the pond to a strange new land. While US history is also replete with its own horrors like slavery and the ruthlessly unjust treatment of native Americans, no nation is without its sins. Still, America was the first human society truly designed for mass human liberty even if on a somewhat selective basis.

The grand experiment worked wonders as power and wealth was shifting away from the 1% and to the 99%. Shorn of their shackles, mankind prospered for the first time in human history and at an unprecedented rate.  A strong and flourishing middle class was born as free markets were delivering good and services, and prosperity for the masses (99%) was achieved. There was peace instead of war and government had limited powers.

But the 1% started screaming “holy shit, we can’t let that happen.  We can’t allow the lowlife people and the unwashed masses to be in charge with free markets and sound money so we will work to transfer that power back to us.”  But the folks had tasted liberty, loved it and so selling the idea of servitude was a daunting and challenging task.  However, the 1% have always been extraordinarily clever. This time around they concocted warm and fuzzy ideologies like socialism, statism, Marxism, communitarianism, globalism, environmentalism, progressivism, collectivism and other ‘ism’s’ to lure the people away from their liberty and prosperity.

These days, the remnants of power, royal families and the world’s elites are now concentrated in 20th century statism (government control of everything), finance (banksters transferring wealth from the 99% to the 1%) and corporatism, plutocracy, oligarchy and monopoly. They no longer need whips, chains, shackles and armies to subdue the people. All they needed to do was sell democracy and get us to vote ourselves back into slavery. It was a brilliant strategy that worked beyond their wildest expectations.

And thus, the small window of human liberty was nailed shut; only this time around the Sheeple People voluntarily marched back to the slavery plantation of the 1%.

Moral of the story: giving any government any power is the equivalent of consenting to slavery.