Posted on 05/09/2005 6:19:48 AM PDT by kjvail
I wouldn't go so far to call it junk science. I do believe that monarchies, as far as general trends, tend to have longer time preferences and are less destructive than democracies. But monarchies are certainly not ideal. It doesn't matter what type of government there is if it is not run by ethical people.
It would be impossible for societies to return a monarchical system. We can't go back and recreate what is gone. We are living in an age of individual empowerment and people would never return to a monarchical system.
Since we cannot depend on any political system to consistently produce ethical leaders, the only solution is to come up with an entirely different system, a system that is designed to be the least destructive and oppressive. To me, that would be the private non-monopolistic system that Hoppe brings up at the end of his book. The specifics of such a system, how we can get there, I don't know.
On second thought.
we fight recruit the jihadis over there, or we then we'll fight them over here
I can't stand that stupid argument about fighing them over here. We lost in Vietnam and yet I don't recall having to fight the communists over here because of it. That type of propaganda is designed for those who enjoy having others think for them. In terms of jihadis, they're probably already over here. If not, it's pretty easy to get in.
With out "ideological slippage," libertarianism cannot exist. Its built in to the philosophy. Of course the monarchists will want a politburo to ensure that the natural outcome is not tampered with by any revisionist or outside influences. But this is all academic, as libertarians will have long settled the problem prior to gaining popularity enough to effect any significant societal changes in their direction.
Well, that was the point of my irony. I agree with you that libertarianism (whatever that really is) will naturally evolve into a "rightwing, highly conservative monarchy", unless some comissariat prevents it.
I was talking -- as you can see if you read the lines you quoted -- about the First World War. It was monarchies and multinational empires -- Serbia, Austria, Russia, and Germany -- that brought that war about. Thus it's understandable why so many people assumed that the war was the last judgment of monarchy. I think they were wrong, but they had good reasons for feeling as they did.
Today, with the benefit of hindsight one could argue that the monarchies should have been left in place in 1919. There's something to be said for the argument. Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns were better than Hitler. Anything would be. But there are also problems with the argument.
It's dubious to claim that Hitler or a Hitler-like figure could never have come to power in a Monarchy. The Italian monarchy didn't prevent Mussolini from coming to power, and the case was similar in Romania. And the idea that a monarch could simply dismiss such a tyrant is a pipe dream.
Hitler did come to power thanks to the old monarchist Hindenberg. He won much support from monarchists and Germany's minor princelings. Such a tyrant could also have come to power because of the failure of a monarchy without a democratic interlude, and this could well have been the case in 1918 or 1919.
You're taking the tyranny produced by a breakdown in democracy (after the earlier breakdown of monarchy) as a sign of democracy's weakness, and ignoring the earlier vices of monarchy that produced WWI and set the stage for WWII. It's true that democracies had trouble cleaning up the mess produced by the First World War, but doubtful that monarchies would have done any better.
Hitler was a rabid anti-monarchist, he blamed them for the defeat of Germany in WWI.
Hitler blamed that defeat on the Jews and Socialists. He did dislike the Austrian monarchy for it's multinational character -- and of course tyrants hate whatever get in their way. But it's not clear that monarchists as monarchists were necessarily against Nazism.
We remember aristocrats who turned against Hitler, and it's right to honor them. But Germany was full of minor kings and petty princes and dukes who supported Hitler. Many joined the party and even the SS -- including relatives of the British, Dutch, and Greek royal families.
Just as Plato predicted and had been show 150 years earlier in France - democracy leads to tyranny.
True, for Plato democracy leads to tyranny. But in his view, monarchy and aristocracy (timocracy and oligarchy, more or less) inevitably end in democracy. It's a cycle. You want to argue that the motion can be arrested at monarchy. In that you're not so very different from Wilsonians who feel that all will lead to lasting democracies. Unfortunately, you can't arrest the process like that.
The philosophy of freewill is not tied down to any current dogma, and what may be the current natural outcome of the current dogma is not absolutelisticly definitive of free will. Time will bring progress, and your commissariats won't prevent it. Monarchy will not continue to be natural outcome.
The imperial prince was member of the NationalSocialist German Workers Party, and openly campaigned for that party, as did most members of the landed aristocracy. Of course this says nothing significant either way.
Not even four years hence you both have completely forgotten the lessons of 9/11... and of 2/26.
I don't want or need a commissariat, and following the inevitable and not very remote collapse of the democratic state, I will be very happy with the natural order as it emerges.
So only those for the Iraq war remember and appreciate 9/11? Get real. You should change your screen name. The first part of it doesn't apply. After the next attack, then we can talk about how great the war was.
Look at Bourbon-Habsburg rivalry. We've had this discussion before.
For a social order to be inherently better one needs to examine the principles underlying the order. Piling on examples of bad monarchs -- particularly when examples of bad republics are close on hand -- does nothing to advance a theoretical argument.
You're welcome to make your theoretical model. Once you have, though, it has to be empirically tested. That's what the examples of bad monarchs are: counterexamples that you ought to take into account. If the opposing evidence is more than the supporting evidence, there's something wrong with you're model. I'm not an expert, so I'm not going to venture a scholarly verdict on Hoppe's hypothesis, but I trust I've presented enough grounds for questioning his theories.
The monarchist argument is that a king has no need to expand his power beyond the point when his kingdom is secure. He therefore naturally tends to govern as libertarians teach, minimally, and with protection of rights as primary concern.
In other words, the argument is that kings will behave as prudent investors, as bourgeois shareholders or rentiers. There are problems with that as well. Kings, like other rulers, are subject to influences and pressures. They are confronted with real or perceived threats to their power and react or overreact in response to them. Moreover, they are subject to lust for power, avarice, hunger for glory, luxuriousness, insecurity and all the other human vices.
Not all monarchs fit Hoppe's happy bourgeois scheme. Some kings have been brought up with an exaggerated sense of their own entitlements and a stunted sense of responsibility. One real problem was that the populace that the kind was theoretically reponsible to often had no voice in its governance. Another was that the members of that public didn't count for much in the thinking of the day. The desire for glory was long seen as the common corruption of monarchy. Flattering and deceitful courtiers have also long been seen as a real problem. It would be nice if monarchies corresponded to Hoppe's ideal, but it's not the case.
What Hoppe's doing is contrasting an idealization of monarchy with a caricature of republicanism. He's selling the mirror image of 18th century republican thinking. They offered a picture of republican leaders as public spirited and virtuous and monarchy as corrupt in large part because they had little experience of real republics in action. Hoppe peddles an idealized version of monarchy, that many who lived under actual monarchies wouldn't recognize as true.
No, the libertarian argument is not about the character of the king at all. The argument is that his position -- as one who governs by birthright and cannot be legitimately ousted -- makes him favor rights, legality, peace, and stability. It doesn't mean that bad kings are impossible, it means that even bad kings are nudged in the right direction by the necessity to avoid a revolution, while even good politicians are nudged into the wrong direction by the necessity to get elected.
There is a valid moralistic argument for Christian monarchy as well -- based on the fact that the Church is the repository of the moral teaching and installs the king -- but I did not make that argument in the post you are responding to.
I give. What is that, Iraq voting day?
See. You forgot.
Is THIS what you're talking about?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/20030226-11.html
I have no idea. I forgot, too.
Even bad kings are nudged in the right direction by the necessity to avoid a revolution, while even good politicians are nudged into the wrong direction by the necessity to get elected.
Unfortunately, insecurity of thrones can nudge bad kings to be even worse -- to become all the more oppressive in the fear that their power is threatened. This is a temptation that is less common in republics than in monarchies or dictatorships. For a public official to know that he will be out of office in four years isn't necessarily a bad thing.
A lot depends on the wider cultural context. Comparing monarchy under the best circumstances to representative governments under the worst circumstances is a crooked game.
LOL!
This is a good way to end the day ... I think I'll hit the sack and watch the boob tube for a while. ;o)
You missed the point. As I said libertarianism is still being developed as a philosophy. The end state theories are most likely only important as a direction. As a minarchist, I'm quite glad that you recognize that the democratic state is unlikely to collapse. When tied to a constitution, democratic states are the best known options of all possibilities.
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