President Trump will give former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a more than well-deserved honor for Giuliani’s 1994-2002 tenure as the best Mayor of New York in history. However, the Medal of Freedom is not all that distinguished; there have been 674 recipients since its inauguration in 1963, there is no title that goes with it and it dies with the recipient, leaving nothing to his heirs. It would be much better to reverse one of the cardinal errors of the Founding Fathers and institute a hereditary peerage, an honors system that would be perpetual, flowing to the recipients’ descendants when there were any. The potential economic and social benefits of such a system are considerable.

Hereditary peerages originated in the feudal system; they were the top-tier landowners who owed allegiance directly to the monarch. In some countries, such as France, Poland and Russia, the peers used their political power to exempt themselves from taxes, increasing the burden on their poorer compatriots, and they were the principal beneficiaries of systems of serfdom, still prevalent in Eastern Europe in the 18th Century. Hence it is unsurprising that in 1787, before the French Revolution, the drafters of the U.S. Constitution believed their liberties would be better assured if no hereditary peerage was instituted.

The Founders should have looked more closely at the evolution of the British constitution and peerage since 1660, and more particularly since 1688. The late 18th century British aristocracy still played a major role in government, but it was not an exclusive one. The best of them were not at all retrograde but keenly interested in the economic development of their estates and the country as a whole. Granville Leveson-Gower, 2nd Earl Gower and 1st Marquess of Stafford (1721-1803) for example was perhaps the most important of all statesmen who nurtured the Industrial Revolution, promoting and financing James Brindley’s (1716-72) Grand Cross system of canals traversing the English Midlands and making goods transportation infinitely easier and cheaper than it had previously been. Together with the middle-class Charles Jenkinson (1729-1808) he formed a decisive bloc in the Younger Pitt’s 9-man Cabinet pushing for economic development from a position of real understanding and knowledge.

By 1914, the U.S. was still something of an outlier in not having a hereditary peerage (though until passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913 the Senate had performed a similar function to the British House of Lords). Only badly run, leftist France had abolished its hereditary peerage in 1870 and even there, magnates such as Jules-Albert, Marquis de Dion played major roles in the country’s economic life – De Dion Bouton had been the world’s largest-volume automobile manufacturer in 1900. In Germany, the aristocracy had come to play a similar role as in Britain, with major industrialists being rewarded with hereditary titles if they wanted them, while in Austria-Hungary and Russia the nobility still retained some of its feudal status.

One harbinger of the future was Britain’s Parliament Act of 1911, which abolished the House of Lords veto on legislation. Even prior to that, however, the ability to create unlimited new titles had allowed unscrupulous governments to indulge in blackmail, in 1712 for the Treaty of Utrecht (when 12 new peers were actually created) in 1832 for the iniquitous Reform Act and in 1911 for the Parliament Act itself. Without a full legislative veto, with the abolition of “trial by peers” in 1948 and with the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords (partial in 1998, proposed to be completed now) the House of Lords became a mere talking-shop.

The greatest damage done to the British hereditary peerage was the invention of Life Peers by the ”dangerous pink” (as his Nanny called him) Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1958. Life Peers were one of those 1950s design ideas, like Brutalist architecture or Abstract Expressionism, which are seen in retrospect to have been a ghastly mistake, to be blown up or burnt if at all possible. The peerage honor has been devalued, its perpetual characteristic has been lost, it is now impossible to leave anything but money to one’s posterity and the ‘crony’ Life Peers created by endless “woke” governments merely clog up the House of Lords and damage useful legislation.

A U.S. peerage would be quite easy to implement; it need not initially involve a formal constitutional change. A statute would be passed empowering the President to create peers of various grades (perhaps Duke, Earl, Baron and Baronet) and putting a hard limit of say five creations per annum and perhaps 200 on the overall number of non-Presidential peers, all of which would be hereditary, passing by primogeniture through both male and female lines. Each President would automatically receive an Earldom on leaving office and the President and Congress would have the right to upgrade that to a Dukedom for any President especially well regarded (maybe Washington and Lincoln initially, perhaps Trump later).

The initial peerages would thus go to the 45 Presidents or their descendants (two of the “47” Presidents were President twice). George W. Bush and John Quincy Adams would not receive separate peerages as they would be due to inherit their father’s, but Benjamin Harrison, being the son of a second son not the direct heir of his grandfather William Henry Harrison, would receive one. Any President with no living descendants (James Buchanan, for example) would be awarded an Earldom only nominally. Thus, subject to any other early Presidents having no living descendants, 42 “live” Presidential peerages would be created on Day 1. There would of course need to be a College of Heralds to check peerage claims.

With an overall limit of five creations per annum, the new hereditary peerage would reach its overall limit of 200 non-Presidential creations only over forty years (or longer if some titles died out), so there would be no particular political bias in the titles’ creation. The open question is whether to give these new hereditary peerages a constitutional role. In principle, hereditary legislators fulfil a role lacking in our money-fueled short-termist politics. They have no need to get elected and their descendants will still be peers a century hence; therefore they will tend to take the long-term view about environmental, demographic and other issues whose consequences will only be known several decades into the future. Since most peers, for example the initial Presidential Earls, will come from families of only modest wealth, there is no danger of them developing into a closed plutocracy, provided successive appointing Presidents do not disgracefully sell honors to billionaires, as did the late unlamented David Lloyd George.

With peers being less corrupt and much less political than most politicians, the obvious solution would be to appoint them automatically to the U.S. Senate, alongside the current 100 elected politician Senators. Since the Presidents and their descendants will come from all political traditions, they will not bias excessively the current Senate balance, but their number and weight will increase gradually, as new Peers are created, until the Senate of 2100 will contain around 350 members, 70% of them hereditary Peers. It will thus be far less political and dominated by donors than the Senate of today; ideally suited to fill the role of the pre-1911 House of Lords.

Socially, a U.S. hereditary peerage would be highly beneficial. U.S. society has been excessively a plutocracy since the Gilded Age; since the peers beyond the first generation would generally be of modest means, often with fairly blue-collar, rural tastes, they would balance this tendency, showing young people that selling your soul to big-city moneymaking is not the only road to success. With the Presidential peers achieving their Earldoms through their political careers, there would be plenty of room in new peerages for non-politicians or politicians like Giuliani who achieve exceptional merit in an office outside Washington; should this proposal be adopted, Giuliani should be one of the first Barons nominated. Most new peers, however, would have achieved eminence in scientific invention, the arts or academic life with perhaps a few awarded for exceptional charitable activity (which should otherwise lose completely its current tax benefits).

Economically, a hereditary peerage would also be valuable. Few businessmen would achieve sufficient uncontested eminence to achieve a peerage, but as in 19th Century Britain, businesses might well find a peer a useful adornment on the company Board of Directors. Such Board members, concerned about their long-term reputation, would generally oppose short-termist policies, such as buying back stock (damaging to shareholders over the business cycle as a whole) and would favor policies that built the company’s reputation and long-term success, precisely what we as shareholders should want. In the 19th Century, U.S. business ethics were notably gamier than those in Europe; the lack of a hereditary peerage may well have been a factor in that, as the businessman who “cut corners” could avoid downside if he had a good lawyer. Installing a hereditary peerage now would reverse that effect, as it would give businessmen and others a need to “keep their nose clean” so they could pass something beyond money to their descendants, entirely without a need for intrusive regulation.

Americans will doubtless scoff at a Brit of un-aristocratic background such as this column’s author recommending a hereditary peerage for the United States. But its advantages are manifold. Most important, it would raise the quality and integrity of U.S. political, social and economic life.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)