My friend Paul sent me this book review of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. The review author compares the decline of the British rich of the 19th Century with our current decline. One thing that he fails to note is that today’s imperiled aristocrats have $700 billion (so far) in TARP money coming to them (more or less directly into their pockets, at least in the case of Merrill Lynch’s executives).
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The British aristocracy was class-based, not money-based. They declined and fell because middle-class people figured out how to make lots of money building businesses, which would have been a humiliating way for an upper-class gentleman to spend his time. After a while, men who controlled millions of pounds sterling naturally became more important than men who owned thousands of acres (largely mortgaged to the first group anyway): the government can’t fund wars with land.
Both the 19th-century British aristocracy and our 21st-century American financial Masters of the Universe suck, of course.