Posted on 05/08/2011 9:36:55 AM PDT by annalex
Not true. A monarch has rights to his property, and a subject -- to his. The concept of rights is central to feudalism.
and yet, the Monarch also has rights to the subject’s property and life.
The concept of obligation is central to feudalism - not individual rights. Certainly not all men being born with equal rights.
A woman whose family fled Iraq was talking about the life they fled - very wealthy - and the life they had in the USA - struggling to make middle class. Someone said “But you had so much in Iraq?” and she pointed out “We had NOTHING - everything we had could be taken away by a whim.”
There are no “individual rights” in a Monarchy - other than that only ONE individual has rights - and the rest are his slaves via varying degrees of house slave and field slave.
But maybe if you scape and bow and bootlick sufficiently - you will be comfortable in your slavery.
Keep drawing up that hand drawn currency - and maybe you will be as entertaining an eccentric as Emperor Norton - your grand schemes will come to the same in the end.
You are a complete lunatic devoid of any sense of reality.
It was a sampling of how royal families react to their people in distress. You don’t think Buckingham Palace was built with 100% private funds nothing coming from taxation do you? The fact is through most of history the coffers or royalty and the coffers of the land they governed were the same, and primarily supported with taxation and profits from conquest (when conquest was profitable).
No good comes from making power venereally transferred.
Observe that everything in feudalism revolved around contractual rights between various feudals. Serfs indeed had very limited rights, and different people had different rights. But that is consistent with any system that repsects individual rights and individual property, even inherited. It was a highly legalistic society, and not at all a tyrannical one.
I would admit that later, around 15c and on, absolute monarchies developed and monarchy lost much of its attraction to a lover of liberty.
What do you think our government is supported with, rose water? Name me a monarchy where taxation went up from zero to near 50% in a hundred years.
There are no rights that a King cannot decide don't apply. Kings can kill their subjects at will.
As I would kill any man who tried to exercise power over me as King - the only tribute LEAD not gold.
The feudal obligation was between a Knight to a Lord and a Lord to a King - the obligation of a serf was to the land and they hand no rights at all that were not subject to the local Knight Lord or King or any of their unscrupulous relations.
But it is futile. Get busy drawing up your currency Norton.
Monarchy is going nowhere - especially here.
Move to “the Kingdom” of Saudi Arabia if you are so enamored of the concept.
and my posterity forget you ever were our countryman.
And they will.
Nowhere.
Clever editing, but let’s look at the rest of the sentence:
the coffers or royalty and the coffers of the land they governed were the same, and primarily supported with taxation
Oh look I was talking about their COFFERS being supported with taxation. Now that you’ve stooped to lying about what I said you’ve proven your position is wrong.
In fact, they had courts where they presided. The system was legalistic; abuses, of course happened.
So you beef with royalty is that the kings sometimes commingled the personal assets and the fiscal assets?
A Lord on his fiefdom was a law unto himself over his peasants. They had no right to go to the King for a redress of grievances - and they would be executed for such effrontery - and their wife and children raped and killed themselves for good measure.
A court system of the Aristocracy - by the Aristocracy - FOR the Aristocracy.
The people had no rights. The Court was there to sort out conflicting duties - not to recognize the individual rights of the people - they had none.
Not sometimes ALWAYS. That and the whole venereal transfer of power thing. Not to mention absolute authority being vested in someone for no apparent reason. Complete lack of involvement of the governed in the government. No method of redress for the people against the government. No method of controlling or replacing the government. A tendency towards idolatry. And just generally that it’s a stupid antiquated system built on the ridiculous theory that the guy with the power somehow deserves it.
There is no doubt that a feudal King exercised dictatorial powers.
That the word has become associated with negative connotations more-so than King is just an amusing aspect of History and the absolute abuse and turning the concept on it's head by the declaration of “dictator for life” (essentially a King in all but name: ‘King’ being “a word hateful to any Romans ear” after the Roman Kings).
The original “dictator” provision of the Roman Republic was quite preferable to a King. He was elected during an emergency to assume dictatorial powers and only for a year or until the emergency was over.
The ideal “dictator” was Cincinatus - and our founders greatly admired him - founding a society under his name - and our great city of Cincinnati is of course named for him.
There’s no confusion over it at all. It’s just how it happens. Kings get dictatorial power, and hand it down to their progeny. At least when they’re not figureheads. The occasional benevolent dictator is nice, but sadly they’re the exception, the exception that some people obsess on then start thinking monarchs are great. But the vast majority of human history shows there’s a big gap between the theory of monarchs and the reality. Kind of like communism, in a pure theory world it’s not such a bad idea, very efficient, very altruistic. In practice with real live humans though both monarchies and communism turn out to be very bad ideas.
And I couldn't agree with you more.
Cincinatus was notable as the EXCEPTION - even when done ‘correctly’ under the Roman Republic - a dictator was known to really ‘stack the deck’ for himself and his family and associates and faction while exercising that one man rule. Cincinatus was notable in that he didn't do all that - he won the war - and went back to his estate.
Look, you really need to educate yourself from something other than comic books. Study the subject a bit. There was no such thing.
Everybody had rights, privileges and duties in the feudal system. That included the king. Those kings who abused their throne were quickly removed because their power was checked by the rest of the nobility. That -- not the consitutional artifacts we have today -- was true separation of power.
The "people", too, had rights and obligations. They were not a homogenous class: some were freemen, or merchants, or clergy, others were serfs. Serfs had the least rights.
The future feodalism will not be like the old. For one thing, earned nobility will probably predominate over the hereditary one; we are not going to have serfdom. Absolute monarchy is indeed contrary to the American character and is not likely to ever be formed here. Much will be decided by a vote, but that is not a foreign idea to the original feudalism. The great difference will be techological: we can form separate social units in the same geography, and we can easily relocate. The patchwork of confessions, occupations, social arrangements, levers of power can be much richer today.
You, too, don’t seem to be in touch with the historical reality. The relationship between elements of the feudal society was very complex, most of it rested on contractually undertaken obligations and not on raw power. Did you read the short primer that I linked in 246?
Your “primer” is an idealized fiction. The vast majority of human history tells us how life REALLY is under a dictator/ monarch, and it ain’t good, and it doesn’t involve any freedom for anybody not in the royal family.
The right to petition the Government for redress of grievances is included by our founders for a reason - because it was NOT a recognized right under feudalism.
Your idea that “true” separation of powers is a Baron saying “King - your son is out raping peasant women - please put a stop to it.” is truly delusional bootlicker.
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