We've replaced a landed aristocracy with a financial aristocracy.
Modern aristocrats farm money, in the form of rents paid for access to money. Land ownership is a useful byproduct.
It's still a feudal system. In the same way medieval peasants were tied to their lord's demesne, the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.
Education will only get someone so far towards becoming a financial farmer.
The irony is that money is a fiction anyway, and socially it's just a proxy for executive power.
So when the aristocratic class decided to 'fund' a project they're simply giving it an aristocratic nod - which they only do if they believe there's an acceptable chance they can benefit from it personally.
No actual stuff flows from one person to another. There's just a temporary infusion of transferred political power and status.
>the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.
This comment being posted on HN is quite ironic. Unless you are philosophically opposed to the Internet there have never been more options for capital access or less reliance on local "aristocracy". The contortions needed to make these kind of arguments should give some indication of their veracity.
That the aristocracy is not geographically local makes it less socially humiliating to ask them for help, but the arrangement is still financially problematic.
That the aristocracy has become more abstract does not mean it has ceased to exist.
So when Kickstarter is bigger or if you consider all crowdfunding then it is an aristocracy? My point still holds. If reality gets in the way of dogma you might want to abandon your dogma.
Your esoteric examples are irrelevant. Come back when a significant percentage of the population finance their house with crowdfunding rather than a mortgage. You seem to be grasping at straws to defend your dogma, and quite honestly you drew a pretty short straw.
Modern aristocrats farm money, in the form of rents paid for access to money. Land ownership is a useful byproduct.
It's still a feudal system. In the same way medieval peasants were tied to their lord's demesne, the modern peasant class is chained inside the local capital flow network and dependent on its favours for survival.
Education will only get someone so far towards becoming a financial farmer.
The irony is that money is a fiction anyway, and socially it's just a proxy for executive power.
So when the aristocratic class decided to 'fund' a project they're simply giving it an aristocratic nod - which they only do if they believe there's an acceptable chance they can benefit from it personally.
No actual stuff flows from one person to another. There's just a temporary infusion of transferred political power and status.