You have to go back to the Holy Roman Empire and the concept of the Lord of the Manor and the Serfs.

Europeans have always had the nobility, those who somehow gained their position and held on to it by passing it on the their heirs.

What made the Americas so great was that people from Europe, who didn’t like the system, either tried to move to places where a republic had broken out (Holland was one place) or came to the “new” uncluttered world.

And they came, young people with ideas, or who had tired of bowing to people who claimed a birthright, or who just got tired of being punished for their religion. When they reached the critical mass, they rebelled against the nobility of England, Spain or France, altho France and Spain sold the new United States their eastern colonies to avoid the importation of the new republicanism into their monarchies.

My family, the Farrs and Stetsons, came to Massachusetts in the 1600’s, The Lambertons and Dovers came as late as the 1920’s, and my wife’s family, the Cecils, were in pursuit of  new worlds, but all of them were escaping the crushing burden of people who were perceived as not contributing.

If you want to get a good picture of why some came to the Americas, read anything about the Crofters in Scotland who immigrated. They were the original landowners in the deep south and they brought an unquenchable will to survive that is missing from many today. The movies are not a great role model, but in “Gone with the Wind,” at the end of the war, they go back to their plantation and the land. They had won it, built it, and by God, were going to keep it.

To be sure, some of the nobility were very good managers, and built their fortunes and families – their houses dot the countryside in England, Germany and France – but many of them wasted their inheritance. Their Families’ high points can be seen mostly in the background on the BBC Antique Road Show program on PBS. It took two World Wars to force many into business and away from their hereditary life of dalliance.

Add the crop failures in the 1700’s, and  you had a political system ripe for change.

All of this led to the mobocracy that became state socialism. Marx and Engels wrote it down, but much of it came from the post reformation and the eventual rejection of Church, King and local Baron. In some cases, the nobles deserved to fall from power, but in other cases, vast areas and numbers of people were cast into oblivion in the name of a “worker’s paradise.”

America flirted with this idiocy in the 1930’s, as Hoover’s government tried to do in 1929 what Carnegie, Morgan and Rockefeller had done in the late 1800’s. They screwed it up by raising taxes and tariffs and pulling back capital. FDR doubled down and we’ve been on a downward slide every since.

Very few of our present Socialist cadre will admit that the system is a failure. They think that if we would just give it a good try in the US, we could make it work and everything would be sweetness and light.

These are the same people flying around the world on our government owned military jetliners, complaining about corporate folks actually doing business while flying around on theirs, and don’t ask them to give up their long black limos either.

The Greeks gave us pure Democracy, Cleopatra, and the early philosophers. Democracy works somewhat in New England, Cleo killed herself, and only the pseudo-intelligencia have actually read Plato or Socrates. If it wasn’t for the Bospherus, Greece would be a pimple on the ….