Dan Hannan : We may have the monarchy, but you have the hereditary ruling class

Dan Hannan reports:

"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground," wrote Thomas Jefferson. He aimed to design a system where the government would be ousted regularly, where power was dispersed, where decisions were taken as closely as possible to the people they affected, and where the citizen was exalted over the state.

That system, as Jefferson kept telling anyone who'd listen, depended on constantly changing the people at the top. If certain families got it into their heads that the republic was their plaything, America would descend into oligarchy as surely as if it had a hereditary nobility.

Are we really contemplating another Bush-Clinton contest in 2016? I mean, Jeb Bush strikes me as a decent sort and, as I've written here before, Republicans badly need Hispanic support. But in a nation of 320 million, the law of averages suggests that there must be some capable candidates with a surname other than Bush or Clinton.

David Cameron may be distantly related to the Queen, but he is not the wife, son or brother of a previous prime minister. He grasped that his job was to prevent the producer-capture of the state machine and, by and large, he succeeded, cutting spending, slimming bureaucracy, rebalancing the economy back to the private sector. Result? The deficit has more than halved, Britain is the fastest-growing major Western country and — incredible as this sounds — more jobs have been created in the U.K. over the past four years than in the other 27 member states of the European Union put together.

America does has a pseudo-monarchy of sorts.