Article I, Section 9, of the U.S. Constitution states in part: “…No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince or foreign State.”
The best precipitating motive behind the inclusion of this prohibitive provision was to ensure that U.S. citizens and public officeholders held no other allegiances other than to our country. Of course, that’s really a trite notion in the 21st Century when half the U.S. Congress is so corrupted by large wealthy special interests that they regularly ignore the public’s best interests.
Large multinational or national corporations have allegiances to no one, not even to sovereign countries. The national laws and legislatures exist solely to be bribed or bought to further expand business interests. Many U.S. nationals have dual citizenships with other countries, and their allegiances to the U.S. are never put into question. Winners of Norwegian Nobel Prizes in many fields are not considered in violation of this statute if they accept the award money; though giving it away to charity might deflect some crazy critics who still question your actual birth within the U.S.
Income stratification in this recession has grow more pronounced in the U.S., even exceeding the gilded ages of the late 1890’s, the late 1920’s and as recently as 2007 which broke all records for greed. Wealthy Americans are essentially running out of things to buy and consume, and worthwhile long-term tangible investments are hard to come by, even with massive amounts of existing capital and steady high incomes. All the while, 50% of the U.S. population is devolving into a new state of serfdom with no real end in sight. There really is no interest among the World’s wealthy to purchase some of the poorest countries or cities in the world. Who would want to be responsible for all those unfunded mandates to actually take care of those residents and dysfunctional places?
Wealthy individuals have spent enormous amounts of their personal holdings running for public office, and have not always successfully. This is really frustrating since they generally get what they want if they are footing the bill. It’s those pesky elections in which the stupid and fickle electorate fails to give them what they want. Since there are only 50 Governorships and 100 Senate Seats in the U.S., these 150 spots have come closest to seats in the powerless British House of Lords which remains one of the last few vestiges of Continental nobility.
Due to other pesky provisions in the U.S. Constitution, the wealthy cannot buy or own humans (at least not Americans). This really takes the fun out of things for some who have more money than God. (Even black market purchases of needed multiple organs such as kidneys, eyes, and other body parts of poor people are just not much fun.) The wealthy can surreptitiously and indirectly control people through legal obligations made by their various legal fictions called corporations, banks, credit card companies, and financial instruments traded on the casinos set up on Wall Street. At least modern forms of human slavery do not discriminate upon the basis of race, creed, color, sex, age, or other impermissible factors.
It seems highly unlikely that we’ll ever raise taxes on the wealthy in the U.S. because their lobbyists and apologists in the Media essentially control all the key members of Congress. Even if marginal income tax rates increase, there will simultaneously be passed a host of new tax credits, exclusions, deductions, and other accounting rule changes that will only benefit the wealthy. In that fashion, they will essentially maintain their effective tax rates well below those of the working middle class. The only taxes likely to be raised will generally fall on the middle class and poor – but fortunately would only be collected from those 60 to 75 percent still working in the great new American post-industrial, post-service, post-everything economy.
We need to promptly adopt a new Amendment to the Constitution repealing the pointless constitutional section noted at the beginning of this essay. We should grant Congress the power to award any and all titles of Nobility for various time periods or in perpetuity, based upon a publicly-posted list of minimal financial contributions to the U.S. Treasury where the final price is determined at auctions conducted by Sotheby’s and Christie’s of New York, still the eBay for the fabulously wealthy. These auctions would be open to any person on the planet, as the U.S. Congress would give out titles of nobility based solely upon the ability to pay.
For instance, if a person wanted to get exclusive rights to the title Duke of Detroit, Michigan for the rest of his life, it might cost at auction just $25,000, whereas the bids for the title of Prince of Miami, Florida would likely run much higher, say $250,000 for life. Most of the proceeds from the final bids, after commissions, would go to the U.S. Treasury. Even many drug lords might toss in some cash for some of the lesser titles, particularly if we asked no questions about large cash payments. If you wanted a larger perpetual title for your entire family and yourself, the final price would likely net millions of dollars for the titles of King and Queen of New York City (and the separately-sold Emperor/Empress set) and the package would also include appropriate lesser titles, such as Prince of Manhattan and Princess of Brooklyn, to the winner’s children. If the children wanted to get the top monikers after their parents’ deaths, they would have to ante up more money, or else those titles could be purchased at auction by anyone else with the money and they would remain just Princes. This would result in a far more “democratic” system of nobility based upon pure capitalism. Since no one wants to pay or raise taxes, this voluntary program would solve that perpetual political impasse.
The top 5% to 10% of Americans already own more than half of the resources and assets of the U.S., reap over half of the total annual incomes in the U.S., and constitute more than 40% of the consumer spending in the U.S. They would gobble these titles up like a crowd at a huge after-Christmas discount orgy for merchandize at Bloomingdales.
Quickly the U.S. would have thousands of people happily parading around as Dukes, Duchesses, Princes, Princesses, Kings, Queens, Emperors and Empresses, and many could hold multiple titles based upon various geographic or civic monikers of their choosing. The U.S. Treasury would keep a detailed computer database to ensure that no one infringes upon any other reserved names. The titles would come with the same protections given to patents, trademarks, and copyrights. If we opened up these bidding wars to non U.S. citizens, we could sell even more titles of nobility, such as Shah of Arizona, Emir of North Dakota, Czarina of Louisiana, and anything else the narcissistic, greedy and well-funded human mind could imagine.
By paying for the privileges of nobility, the world’s wealthy could affix these titles on their personal stationary, business cards (if they even bother to have them) and most importantly, require the rest of us plebeians to call them by their titles in daily conversations, emails, and twitters, and that all forms of media properly and endlessly reference them by their titles. Finally, those that paid for their titles of nobility would be exempt from certain traffic and criminal penalties, such as speeding, drunk driving, drug possession, securities fraud, rape, and a limited list of certain pre-approved murders such as killing other titled nobility when fighting over naming rights. This type of massive global ego massage is something the wealthy cannot yet buy but might gladly pay large sums for the privilege.
There could be created a lucrative private secondary market in trading or exchanging titles of nobility but the U.S. Treasury should impose a transfer tax in such situations in order to extend legal protections to the new holders. (Wall Street would probably find a way to securitize groups of these titles for even more non-productive global profits.) This competition over titles of nobility generated between the wealthy of the country would generate much needed money to the U.S. Treasury, and would become the only effective and de-facto means of taxing them by providing them with that special something few people on the planet could purchase – which would also make those titles even more valuable to the American Economy and Government.
This country really needs a defined source of taxes to pay off our massive U.S. debt. It only would take a small change to the Constitution to accomplish and more than 75% of Congress and all state legislatures would fall over themselves in passing it, just to please their large campaign contributors. Since the world’s wealthiest citizens and non-citizens essentially own our global economies, our governments, and many of our future employment and financial opportunities, we should permit them to own some nice titles of nobility and thereby generate much needed new tax revenues that would benefit the rest of us.
Marc Pascal in Phoenix, AZ