Malthus and Synarchy

Jan 28
12:00

2005

Robert Bruce Baird

Robert Bruce Baird

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There are many ways to characterize economic theory and its major influence Synarchy or the landed class. We read about the Equestrian class in Rome and the farmers or Bauers who became the De Medicis and later the Rothschilds. All of them seem to make a good case for Physiocratic laissez-faire policies that allow the landed class or Divine Kings to continue to rape and pillage rather than create wealth and co-operation. I liken it to the Toilet Philosophy of the over-arching paradigm they foment for the plebes to consume and I call it the One Pie theory. Malthus certainly was a ‘dismal economist’ and he is part of something far more intrinsic in our society founded on Platonic hierarchy. Here are some more in depth thoughts from a far larger article in the American Journal of Economics that I think most people should study.

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“The population debate is essentially a struggle between "reactionary" and "radical" social thought. No one has had more of an impact on the population debate than Thomas Robert Malthus. His reactionary work,Malthus and Synarchy Articles Essays in the Principles of Population, created an economics of scarcity and austerity that served to promote inequality in defense of a landed aristocracy. Malthusian theory has survived two centuries and continues to be at the center of the population debate, the controversy over the limits to economic growth, and the argument concerning the nature and causes of poverty (Myrdal, 1962, 5-6)

Henry George, writing a century after the dismal economist, understood the ideological function that Malthusian economics served. He provided a most thorough critique of Malthus in Progress and Poverty. George's radical paradigm provided an economics of abundance and social justice. He insisted that poverty did not result from nature as Malthus contended, but rather from the social policies that protect the landed class at the expense of the poor.” (4)