Modern Day Aristocracy

Umar Zulk

Imagine if you will a democracy, where its elected representatives are endowed with tremendous power, so powerful are these officials that they stand on different levels from their constituents, they who don the sobriquet of “VVIP”, they who consider themselves the betters of their kindred spirit, the epitome of hubris, the symbol of opulence.

Now imagine such a “democracy” where the people are made, by the elected sovereign, to provide a tithe for the state with the moniker of taxes, and which the state, the elected members of parliament with their prerogatives as champions of democracy could use for all the varying reasons they deem fit whether it be whimsical pleasures or beneficial to the peasantry, the plebeian constituents. After all, the tithe is clearly a separate wealth belonging to the noble sovereign, not to be tainted by the unrefined, ungrateful masses.

However so, under all the apparent perfections of the democracy, we start to see underneath it, a hideous world of inequality and heinous injustices. The purpose of this rhetoric is to invite a return to caution. To examine, without favouring any sides, the status quo of our politics that prioritises certain individuals in power, these elected officials, these VVIPs and mysteriously attracts incompetence within the civil service to the chagrin of the learned.

Essentially, there is a need for distinction between persons who hold office and the citizenship though limits must always be imposed. Too much power to the sovereign will corrupt. Using a recent example it is not that a private jet was chartered at the behest of our great sovereigns that should be the question but rather the purposes it was chartered for and for whom it was chartered for. Does it benefit the nation in any way or perhaps, in light of difficult and economic turbulence, a commercial flight would have been the better choice?

This then brings us to incompetence of governance mainly of a responsible fiscal position which entails that some basic understanding of taxation should have been present. Unfortunately even a basic understanding is sometimes a rare trait among our betters, the patricians of parliament. Tis no surprise that during this lifetime that we were all fortunate enough to witness the most inept, pitiful, devoid of any sense, and down-right incompetent statement ever to have surfaced in our politics. Hyperbole aside (there have been endless ineptitude in politics on all fronts) twas a statement made clarifying that the government’s money is a complete and totally different entity  to that of the majority that was accumulated from the tax-payers (us) its purpose only shows ignorance in seeing that no such distinction exist. Unless, as previously mentioned, twas a remark focused on the tithe collected from the peasantry for the usage of high-born nobles but alas we could not say for sure.

Whether it was bravado, wilful ignorance or ineptitude that led to the current state of politics, at this point on, a clearer picture of the so called democracy could be seen. The champions of democracy elected by the ignoble peasantry are free to spend away the tithe collected. The squabbles of the common folk are placed as little concerns; mere annoyances unfit to taint the ears of the noble representatives; the high born of this nation, for tis quite tedious the act of nation building and fiscal responsibility, better to gallavant around the world a task better suited for the avarice of nobles, how insolent these plebeians are towards the patrician MPs. This is the truth behind the democracy, the modern day aristocracy.