Contemporary economists have made a living telling the poor that they should not resent the man who inherits his wealth. They have said he who is worth his money will make it work for him, accumulating more and forging a great empire of gold and paper. Those who are not worth their inheritance will only live to spend it frivolously, watching everything their parents build wither away and die. Perhaps this was true in the days when even the wealthiest of men had only a few millions to their names and an enormous rate of inflation made whatever they earned yesterday become worthless in the morrow. In an environment of extreme competition and high inflation, one should not disrespect the man who is in born into riches, for the definition of riches is a very fickle one, and he may find himself in rags like the rest of his fellows if he ever refuses to pull his weight. It is, however, in times such as ours that we must question those whose enormous fortunes continue to replicate themselves without any regard for merit or success. It is in our time that money works for the man instead of man working for his money.

Regardless of what philosophers and economists alike may suggest, there is some magical quality about capital. After it has reached a certain threshold, it will grow at a rate of five percent per year whether its heirs squander it or not. Thomas Piketty's Capital makes that point rather effectively and severely, at times. Once capital has accumulated to the point where it can't be erased by every blip in the stock market or real estate crash, it will generally double itself every twenty years. Furthermore, as capital becomes more concentrated, it grows at greater rates. Therefore, a person who manages four restaurant franchises, for example, will see a worse rate of return than the man whom owns the entire chain. The more capital a person has the faster that capital will grow. This is not purely because those endowed with more money to invest are more intelligent, or because they are able to make riskier investments. Were that true, all investments over time and space would even out. The more intelligent investors would exist on every wealth bracket and riskier investments in the wealthy would produce some tremendous winners and other spectacular losers, making the overall investment return rate for every income bracket the same. This is not true. We know that billionaires can expect at least ten percent annual growth, millionaires can expect at least five and everyone else will be lucky to break even once inflation is accounted for. This is due, more than anything else, to the fact that the wealthy can hire better advice to service their capital. If a billionaire spends only spends one third of a percent of his total wealth to help manage his assets, he is spending three times more than his millionaire friend is worth altogether, and many thousand times the net worth of any smaller investor. He may not have a brain in his head, but his enormous reserves give him a sort of financial momentum that can't be broken. And if he's swallowing the lion's share of the profits, it is nearly impossible for those below him to move up.

Of course, there are only a few thousand billionaires in the world today so perhaps the point is moot; however, if they continue to grow their fortunes at a rate so much greater than everyone else, it won't be long before they own everything in the world. One only needs to read the Forbes list to see that their reserves are reproducing much faster than ever before. Whereas an inventor like Thomas Edison had to churn out new ideas at an almost inhuman pace to keep bread on the table in centuries past, the post-modern era allows for a perpetual fiscal dynasty to be founded upon something as inconsequential as "Segways". The disparity resides in three main differences with the past: lack of economic competition at the very top, a sluggish economy and inflation to match, and the rise of investment banking.

The bright minds that once were attracted to science and mathematics are now courted by Wall Street and its compatriots. Money is no longer being made from great discoveries, but by great investments. By some estimates, the financial services industry was responsible for almost thirty percent of all profits made in the American private sector by the time of the 2008 credit crunch. In a low inflation environment, this makes perfect sense. Money is not devalued the instant it's made, and thus it attracts financial investment. High inflationary environments attracts new businesses and new ideas, because it's always going to be more expensive to spend tomorrow than today. The price of a new invention can change over time with consumer spending, whereas assets are far more erratic. A person has to be a brilliant investor to make a profit in a high inflationary market. They have only have to be moderate inventor or businessman. The opposite is true under low inflation, where one great financial victory can keep a family fed forever but it takes many attempts at inventing to find something that resonates with investors and a fickle consumer basis.

A high rate of inflation, therefore, is the most appropriate manner in which to stimulate social mobility, as it forces men to work for their money instead of their money to work for them. Unfortunately, such rates of inflation lend themselves exclusively to periods of extreme instability and often accompany rather calamitous circumstances. Consider that the only period of sustained inflation in human history (the 1950's to the late 1970's) was created as a result of the economic dividends of the Second World War. Although it is difficult to argue that incredible economic growth and widespread social mobility of those thirty glorious years was a poor period for humanity, as it catapulted the world into modernity, it came at costs that mankind cannot ever feasibly repeat. Humanity simply doesn't have an extra fifty million people to spare every few decades during a world conflict. Inflation, even when not caused by disaster, can be extremely dangerous. Left unchecked, it can cause economic devastation, such as the stagflation of the late 1970's and 1980's, or the hyperinflation of inter-war Germany or post-soviet Russia, which eliminated an entire elite class and sent thousands to their graves from starvation. Inflation, especially high inflation, can be even more devastating than flat or deflationary rates, as although they don't allow concrete hierarchies to establish, they destroy everything else as well.

The key then, is determining some method of stimulating social mobility to the extent that every person is able to make the greatest and most meaningful contribution to society possible, without increasing the post-modern world's stable inflation rates. In this, nothing is more important than re-examining the role of capital in society. Traditionally, the purpose of capital is one of self-replication. A person is expected to take capital from investors which he uses to create more capital for himself and his partners which is used in more investments. Thus, capital is the root of capital. One must always spend money to make money. This then becomes the fact that unfairly imprisons so many to a life of miserable, inescapable poverty: those without money cannot hope to make more.

There is, of course, the nagging neo-conservative voice in the backs of our heads, reminding us that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, work harder and make enough money for themselves to attain success. This may be a classical libertarian theory that thoroughly warms our hearts, but does this make any sense in the real world? The first priority of an employer is to ensure that he can pay his employees as little as possible while getting the maximum amount of work in return. Pay only rises as a function of productivity; so although a person is paid more for doing better, more efficient work, it is always the minimum estimation of what that work is worth. Simultaneously, business owners have the responsibility to sell the most of their product for the highest prices possible. Thus, with the use of commercial advertising, pay-day loans and limited salaries, private business can keep the world in the same class because even if a person is lucky enough to make more money, they can be shamed into buying more merchandise. Our materialistic, consumerist society has already proven as much. If a person raises a pay grade, they suddenly have a corporate enforced moral responsibility to buy more, never allowing one to save up enough to prove a real threat to the establishment. Pulling oneself up by their bootstraps in a laissez-faire system may work for a limited few, but on the scale of millions, or billions, it is nothing more than a poorly contrived fantasy.

Inheritance is the key to finding success in the cruel world of sluggish growth and low inflation. Firstly, divisions between the upper and lower middle class are being determined by how parents are able to fund their child's post-secondary education. The importance of higher education is rapidly increasing as the world becomes more technical, with less importance given to the blue collar occupations that once the defined the world economy. Yet, the costs of university and college are also dramatically increasing, with governments refusing to subsidize to the same extent they did with high school during the early twentieth century. Youth employment is also much lower than ever before, for a variety of reasons, real and perceived, and scholarships are growing nominally with the economy, not in relation to the costs of education. Thus, those lucky enough to be endowed with parents who can afford to pay for their university can hope to obtain a career that pays at least three times as much as their less fortunate counterparts, and a chance at further financial success.

Inherited capital is also threatening to eclipse the manner in which private business is invested in. With banks thoroughly interested in risky asset transfer and mortgage bundles that pay huge returns when they succeed and receive government bail-outs when they fail, the only true source for capital is private investors. As money becomes more concentrated over time, however, those private investors will become much fewer and farther between, although each having access to much larger reserves of cash. In times of competition, investors would compete for good ideas, attempting to get an advantage over their fellow investors. This may have the unintended consequence of making the person they invest in rich, creating another competitor, but the immediate threat would outweigh the potential threat in the future. As competitors grow fewer in number, and money is passed into undeserving hands, investors will have start to move away from this mindset. Their wealth would be too huge to ever need to worry about other aristocrats, therefore their primary concern would be to keep those below them in their place, even it means vivisecting ideas. After all, their capital will grow faster passively than it ever would investing in risky, start-up ventures. It would be much more beneficial to keep expanding the family business and to continually consolidate or buy more competitors.

This can be solved with the simple action of ending inheritance, making it illegal for a parent to pass anything down to their child. As I explained in the previous chapter, it is possible for children to pay off the exact value of their raising, thereby ending any form of financial relationship between parent and child. A parent can provide important life lessons and indoctrinate their child as they see fit, continuing those emotional segments of parenthood, but may not leave anything palpable behind. If no gifts or unfair advantages are provided, every child will an equal footing in determining their own life. There would be no limits placed on them but their own laziness, inefficiency or stupidity. Given this, the state would also have the moral authority to eliminate social assistance, as a person could now only blame their poverty on their own actions.

One's estate, at the time of death would simply be dissolved and given to the government, which it would sell at the highest profit possible. Although this would mean that a person had incentive to kill their business competitor so they could buy a piece of their business when it came to market, the same incentive would be placed on everyone's head, providing the very impetus for civilization. Living amongst humans always increases one's chance of being murdered, which is why humans create laws and surrender the right to murder: to protect themselves and the society around them. Out of fear that their own lives would be forfeit, businessmen would choose not to kill their fellows for profit.

There would exist no more reason to define a corporation as its own entity. Corporations would be purely defined by their owners, making their owners liable for all the actions of the company and allowing the corporation to die upon the death of its owner. There would be no shared ownership as the size of corporations would be limited (see next chapter). The process of making each corporation the manifestation of just one man is also a manner in which capital will be controlled and social mobility reinvigorated.

Instead of relying on the exploitation of the bourgeoisie, entrepreneurs would look to the public sector for their first infusion of capital. As this system often allows for great corruption and government waste, rules must be placed to ensure that only the most deserving businesses and the men behind them succeed. Primarily, as government resources would be unlimited, loans would also be unlimited, in the sense that any person who requested one would have that requested granted. A person can ask for any amount of money and they must be given it, but every loaned amount must be repaid in a certain amount of time. A society be can creative with the manners in which the debt is punished if left unpaid, but enslavement is probably preferable, as a person would be forced to pay back their debt by making a direct contribution to society but deriving no profit from their labour.

The government having infinite money does not mean the government has infinite resources, however. The currency of the chronimistic economy is essentially backed by labour hours, and there being only so many labourers on earth and so many hours in which they can work, that number, although large, is not infinitely large. Therefore, labour, not capital, will be scarce. As such, the entrepreneur will be required to convince workers to join his cause using non-monetary incentives. The most compelling incentive, of course, is a genuine need for his product. 

This is intended to produced a symbiotic relationship between the consumer and the producer where, when the economy is out of balance, workers will form together to apply for a loan to produce a needed product, ending production of a useless product. The market will come to regulate itself much in the same way as the invisible hand, but the driving force will here will be the choice of labour allocation not capital allocation.

To allow for this system to function properly, the concept of a capital loan will have to be re-imagined. If the government offers lump sums to entrepreneurs, they can simply choose to pay workers more than they are objectively worth (given chronimistic calculations) to entice them into labour that is economically unproductive and not what the worker would have chosen otherwise. To avoid this, a loan will not be simply be a bundle of cash, as we now conceptualise it, but a government-issued authority to declare work as officially being work. When granted a loan, the entrepreneur will be able to formally acknowledge the labour his employees are doing on his behalf, giving those employees the ability to apply for compensation at the given rates. The entrepreneur would as well be personally liable for all payments issued on his authority.

Prospective business people would be encouraged to limit the amount of money for which they ask, for if their venture failed, larger debts would take more effort to pay off and perhaps incur greater penalties. As the government collects no taxes, besides the pay-roll and child tax, giving larger loans would place no greater burden on their tax base, so waste only affects the person wasting. Being that there is a tax associated with being an employee, and capital is so easy to come by, workers would be encouraged to go into business for themselves, creating more competition which would decrease prices, increase market evolution and also redistribute wealth more evenly.

Once the initial government investment is made, further expansion would only be possible through the fiscal powers of the owners. Thus, if their business performed well, they could reinvest their profits. If it did poorly, their business would stay the same size forever, or eventually be swallowed up by a competitor. Business owners could buy the enterprises of their adversaries, but doing so would increase the number of employees, increasing taxes, making such consolidation difficult and undesirable.  

Such government policies would allow every single individual with the will power to create a new product or provide a new service the means to do so effectively. A person would not be measured by the circumstances of their birth but instead by the contents of their brain and the sweat on their back, the very purpose of chronimism. Capital is not evil. It is an important tool for regulating the growth of the economy and the creation of new goods, but when it becomes too concentrated in too few hands for too many arbitrary reasons, it must be redistributed. Government control is not ideal, but creating such a liberal system provides equality of opportunity like never before at a negligible cost.

Never again will a corporation become too big to fail. Instead, all people will have every incentive to go into business for themselves, creating more competition and perpetuating the buyer's market. Profits will be lowered as the size of corporatism slowly shrinks, but money will be worth more as competition drives down prices. That means that entrepreneurs will still have ample reward for their successes, but their successes will no longer guarantee the failure of others. The control of capital is one of the pillars of a chronimistic society, as without it, a person can never hope to improve their future.