Aristotle

The story is told of a rich man who must transport a heavily-laden barge down the river. This is long before domesticated beasts of burden (who actually talks like that?), so he hires a large group of poor men, let’s say fifty, to pull the barge up the river. He pays them $250 total, so five bucks per person. They do manual labor for a living, so they are strong. But individually, they have no intrinsic incentive to pull the barge. As long as the barge is moving, each worker is content to slack off, merely acting like he is working hard. They are all prone to this lack-luster labor, so they hire one in their midst (really, who?) the role of task master. Task Master, or simply The Master, as they call him, does not pull the barge. He simply walks alongside the barge and looks for those laborers whose ropes are not taught and whose muscles aren’t flexed and whose sweat glands aren’t excreting (not me!). The kicker is that the role of The Master is so valuable to the rest of the company that they are each willing to pay him one dollar to ensure that no one is slacking off. So each of these laborers is now netting four dollars, but the one who is just walking and looking and occasionally whipping is netting $55.
This is a representation of Trigg’s explanation of Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s guardians of the society. Aristotle asks, “If the guardians are not happy, who are?” This makes me believe that according to Aristotle, the most essential and valid members of society, on an individual basis, are those who are in charge. For the barge to keep moving, we could sacrifice one or two pullers without losing too much power. But if we lose the task master, the whole system breaking down is not far behind. So, to avoid that, Aristotle wants to put the guardian on a higher plane than everyone else. If we are able to keep the task master happy and productive and doing his job, then it benefits everyone else. We call that trickle-down economics. You give the tax breaks to publicly owned corporations, and those benefits take hold on the actors all the way from the CEO to the guy who owns a few shares of the company