Wealth in the UCS

Agronomy and a Landed Oligarchy

By John Taylor; 2009 Sep 05, Asma 17, 166 BE

We recently finished a prolonged discussion of the democratic element of the universal civic society (UCS). A UCS refers to the condition of society after the formation of a world government. Today we move on to its material element, that is, how a UCS would handle finance, money and wealth. We saw at the beginning how Aristotle wrote that "under oligarchy there is a property qualification." An oligarchy is an energetic moneyed class ruled by enlightened self-interest. The history of the rise of modern institutions of high finance, banking, credit, bonds and stock markets demonstrates the many potential benefits of a healthy, vigorous oligarchy.

The good aspects of oligarchy become especially apparent when the wealthy are tied by agronomy (an economy where the majority of the population are involved in farming and gardening) to the land and are rooted in and bounded by a particular locality or region. The existence of borders, language barriers and other artificial cultural divides restricts the overall wealth of oligarchs and, worse, gives one oligarchy unfair advantages over others.

It effectively weaponizes the world economy.

A UCS will do the reverse, it will move the economy to a peace setting, just as the famous prophesy implies: it will forge swords into plowshares by shifting the world economy from a war footing to an agricultural, solar orientation.

Why do agronomy and oligarchy go together so well? Because of the fundamental fact that all physical wealth (as opposed to knowledge and information) comes from the star we call the sun. As a result, the ultimate source of wealth is the happy combination of biology and solar energy that grows our food.

This is true not only physically but also spiritually.

Because farmers and agriculturists are in direct contact with nature and its ways, they learn a special set of virtues. They become stoic realists, conservative in the best sense of the word. When they and their virtues come first, everything else falls together. Oligarchy and agronomy embrace, as depicted in the Psalm, "Mercy and truth meet together. Righteousness and peace have kissed each other." (Ps 85:10, WEB) Since it is upon land that the sun shines, a landed oligarchy will tend to spread new wealth around better than any other foundational enterprise. Since the sun shines upon everything gardeners should therefore be placed everywhere on the surface of the earth in order to access the flow of energy in that location.

Thus, an agronomy most efficiently enables a society to approach the ideal state where everyone is, if not a member of the oligarchy, at least has a stake in the commonwealth. This means that the UCS should be so organized that the best chance for ambitious youth to gain wealth in their careers to go into farming or some other agricultural profession involved in exploiting energy from the ultimate renewable energy source, the sun. This would best suit the ecological needs of earth as well as the best in human nature.

The UCS should therefore aim at a modern version of the diversified agronomies that vitalized the most creative times in history, such as Ancient Greece, Babylon and Renaissance Italy. The big question is, then, what adjustments to the economy will make it such that the brightest and most ambitious will always see their best prospects for a better life in exploiting the sun for production? In upcoming essays we will explore how to do this in both urban and rural settings, and how this would affect the rest of the economy in a UCS.