The Crown’s Cronies and MAGA’s Millionaires: How Trump’s 2025 Legislation Scourge Resurrects a Stuart-Era Tragedy
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What happens when a ruler trades national strength for personal favors? When state resources become the toys of the court, and economic power is hoarded like royal trinkets?
In 1604, England gave us an answer. It was the year the Statute of Monopolies and crown patents hit their peak—where royal power was sold off to cronies through exclusive rights to salt, starch, playing cards, and even funeral services. It created a tidal wave of centrally planned economics, corruption, price hikes, and public outrage. England’s economy suffered not because of invasion or plague—but because of policy.
In 2025, Donald Trump is pulling the same scam—only now it’s wrapped in crypto contracts, tanning bed tax breaks (yes), making gun silencers easier to purchase by removing excise (also yes), dark money loopholes, bond yield busting budgeting, an IRS gutted by ignorance or worse, and a litany running from the wacky to the wtf.
According to The Economist, Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” proposes reckless tax cuts that mirror the economic madness of his first term—slashing corporate taxes, ballooning the deficit, and showering the wealthy with windfalls while middle-class Americans are handed the bill in the form of inflation, broken public services, crippled safety nets, critical public health suspensions, and generational debt. It’s not just bad policy. It’s royal favoritism in the form of a meme coin with the bill footed yet again by the American people.
And like James I before him, Trump is selling out the future for a fragile illusion of strength.
The 1604 Crown Patents: A Stuart-Tudor Get-Rich-Quick Scheme
Let’s go back to England, under the jittery rule of King James I.
To shore up cash without calling Parliament—the first of the Stuart kings, as the line took over from Elizabeth I, Tudor—James began issuing monopolies and patents to his favorites. These weren’t inventions or innovations. They were exclusive licenses to control entire industries: from salt to cloth to wine. Crown favorites could set prices, crush rivals, and extract wealth from the everyday subject with no accountability.
The public response? Fury.
Bread prices soared.
Local economies collapsed under monopolist control.
A single patent-holder could ruin a town’s trade overnight.
Commoners, artisans, even minor nobles rose in revolt—not with arms, but with petitions, pamphlets, and parliamentary fury.
This fury culminated in Parliament’s 1624 Statute of Monopolies, one of the first modern laws to restrict the abuse of economic favoritism by the state. It limited royal patents to genuine inventions and made it illegal to grant monopolies for basic goods.
It wasn’t about taxes. It was about who the rules were for—and whether the crown served the common people, or just the court.
The 2025 MAGA Tax Bill: A Billionaire’s Monopoly on Growth
Now look at the U.S. in 2025.
Trump’s proposed tax bill promises more cuts for ultra-wealthy, extended loopholes for pet projects, reduction in enforcement on collection (we saw what happens when taxes aren’t collected), and a centralized economy all vested in an all-powerful executive—we know how those go all following the pattern of his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—which:
Slashed the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%,
Added $1.7 trillion to the national debt,
Gave 83% of benefits to the top 1%,
And still failed to deliver sustained wage growth for working Americans.
This year’s redux proposes even deeper cuts with even less oversight—gutting revenue, ignoring long-term deficits, and prioritizing short-term stock buybacks over public investment. It’s the Crown Patent reborn: not in monopoly and centralized economics over salt or coal, but over wealth creation itself.
The only thing this bill manufactures at scale is inequality.
Meanwhile:
Public health is slashed beyond repair (oh, and they’re in deep MAGA red areas where low tax states are weened on the federal dollars of commonwealth states).
Infrastructure projects intentionally stalled.
Federal departments shrink or die quietly.
And ordinary Americans? They get a front-row seat to a Renaissance of Robbery.
Trump calls it economic freedom. History calls it economic favoritism in the face of certain failure.
Who Pays for Royal Favor? Then and Now
In 1604, a London fishmonger could suddenly find himself banned from selling without a royal license.
In 2025, a small business owner watches their effective tax rate stay the same while mega-corporations dodge billions. A public-school teacher pays more in income tax than the CEO of an oil company.
The result is the same: a system where the rules are designed to benefit those who least need the help.
The Trump’s Big, Beautiful Boondoggle isn’t a growth plan. We are FAR outside the Laffer Curve, even if you’re arguing the supply side. It’s a protection racket—fueled by the fantasy that the law of diminishing returns does not apply to the United States. Sorry, American Exceptionalism went out the window in January 20, 2025. But as with James I’s monopolies and highly centralized economy, the tide has already receded. And we can see who’s left standing on dry land: the courtiers, the loyalists, the shadowy dealers.
Everyone else? Soaked, stuck, and signing the check at the end of the republic…err, night.
The Public Always Pushes Back—Eventually
James I was eventually forced to curtail his patent scheme—not out of charity, but to avoid a constitutional showdown. Parliament, backed by the people, saw through the economic illusion.
The same reckoning may await MAGA economics. Already:
Moody’s warns of rising deficits and reduced fiscal flexibility.
Economists project negative real wage growth by 2027.
State governments face federal funding cliffs due to gutted revenue streams.
Even business leaders are uneasy—because tax cuts don’t work when no one can afford the product.
Just as Parliament saw the Statute of Monopolies as a defense of economic justice, today’s Congress has a similar choice: rubber-stamp another national corporatist agenda—or reclaim the republic from royal recklessness.
Renaissance Lessons: The Medici Would Laugh at This
Let’s be clear: The Medici, the masters of Renaissance economics, would never have endorsed such idiocy.
They taxed commerce, not workers. Hell, they even taxed themselves.
They invested in public architecture and cultural prestige—not stock buybacks.
They funded universities, embassies, and artisan workshops—not “Trump Account” Ponzi schemes (again, yes, those are in the boondoggle).
They knew something Trump doesn’t:
A republic thrives not when the rich get richer, but when the rules make sense to the people, especially those paying the price.
Reboot the Renaissance—Before the Realm Collapses
We’ve seen this before:
England under James I.
France before the Fronde.
Even the Ottoman Empire, when tax farming bankrupted provinces.
What starts as a revenue gimmick becomes a trust crisis. What starts as a bill becomes a battle. And what begins as a court reward ends in a courtroom reckoning.
Congress still has a choice. America still has a chance.
Vote down the MAGA monopolies. Don’t trade our future for another crown patent dressed in red, white, and resentment.
Unless, those tanning beds really are worth their while to you…