this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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It's easier to remove a king because a king is a single person, easily identifiable, tangible and living.
An establishment is none of those things, it's murky and unclear, it's lots of different people and nobody all at once.
I think she was talking about removing the system of monarchy, not removing a king. The former is much harder.
Much harder. Which is why the Commonwealth of England only lasted 11 years...and we still have a freaking monarchy ruling by divine rights now...
Technically, sure. But, when was the last time the monarch flexed his/her muscles and used his/her power? There are rumours that in 2010 Elizabeth refused to allow another election. But, that barely counts. She didn't pick a winner, she didn't influence the election, she just said that she was just going to withhold her rubber stamp, to call another election. Then there's Australia in 1975 when the governor general (acting on behalf of the queen) fixed a deadlocked parliament by removing the PM, appointing his opponent, and requiring that an election be called immediately. Before that, you have to go back to Churchill being appointed as PM despite not being the leader of his party. But, again, that wasn't some task the monarch took on alone, he was advised by the whip, the PM, and various other people in top government spots.
IMO the current constitutional monarchies are basically republics with a safety valve. If the monarchs ever abuse their power, they know that the countries would happily switch over to a full republic. But, they can be tolerated, maybe even loved, if their only roles are ceremonial plus the occasional nudge to unstick the gears when they get jammed.
I just don't agree that having a monarch that is the head of a church can ever be accepted. Plus, the royals do vet many, many bills from the government and change them.. The monarchy also receives the inheritance from anyone that dies on "their" land without a will. And to top it all off, the Queen gained many, many exemptions to racial equality laws.
They have a lot more power than is often let on. And even if they didn't, what is the argument for having a useless bunch, including known paedos, get money from the tax payer just because they were born into a certain family? I can't make it make any kind of moral sense.
For the vetting of laws: "They included draft laws that affected the Queen’s personal property such as her private estates in Balmoral and Sandringham, and potentially anything deemed to affect her personally."
Besides, that's just them running the bills by her. Ultimately, it's parliament and the senate who decide on the laws. Once that's done she rubber stamps them.
Sure, the royals get a big income, and there are some old-fashioned laws that benefit them, or they're exempt from the rules others have to follow. But, these are small details that barely affect the lives of anybody living in the UK. I'm sure if you looked you'd find various carve-outs in US laws that benefit Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, and they're not even technically in the US aristocracy.
The power to do what, for example?
Why change a working system? The money they receive from the UK taxpayers is tiny. They get less than £100m out of a budget of £1.2t. That's 0.008% of the budget, and you could argue that their presence probably roughly offsets that with the tourism money generated. Most of their income is the result of their massive wealth and land holdings. But, that makes them no different from the multi-billionaires in the US. It's not some magical sovereign thing that extracts money from the UK, it's inherited wealth, same thing that results in so many Waltons on the list of US billionaires.
Do you think it's massively different from the Walton family's wealth and power, or the Koch family's wealth and power, or Musk, Gates, Bezos, etc?
If you go back through the links I posted, it includes far more sweeping legislature vetting than what affected her personally. And also exempting people from non-dicrimination law because they have certain ancestory is weird, isn't it?
To stop people advancing in their career because of the colour of their skin. The power to take dead people's money if they don't have a will. The power to direct the army (the armed forces oaths are to the monarch, not the country or government - this was almost tested in planned coups in 1968 and 1974; both actively planned by King Charles' great-uncle and led to a "military exercise" that Downing Street weren't informed of as a warning to toe the Firm line).
Or how about a ban on police searching their properties for stolen goods? Or exemptions to green bills.
The royal family are like lobbyists on steroids and the idea that has no power is not correct.
This is patently false. £100m a year for FIVE PEOPLE (active royals) is by no means a small amount. This is the same as 3096 incomes for the average household in the UK, or 4467.7 nurses with five years experience.
Why do they deserve to get this money if not because it's their "divine right"? How is that not utterly fucked up?
And the "tourism" answer doesn't hold water. Both the Louvre and the Palace of Versailles, both former palaces, receives 50% more visitors than Buckingham Palace.
Please bear in mind that this is all for one family that have done absolutely nothing to earn it. How can we justify £100m a year (much of which ended up in the Panama and Paradise papers) for a single family? And that doesn't even take their net wealth into account.
Like the income of the people mentioned below is actually tiny, but their wealth is huge. About £20 BILLION huge. And all because of "divine rights". But of course, that's only an estimate because the royal family got the law changed so they never have to say how much they actually have (because they have the power to change laws, as mentioned above).
Absolutely agree. No one should be able to pass on this amount of wealth through a hereditary line. It just has no moral justification to give people money (and thus power) just for being born. That's why capitalists were nicknamed robber barons.
king has never been a single person that was easily identifiable. it is was a huge extended family, distant relatives, lords with no blood relation, central army of the king and multiple armies of many lords, huge institutions that manage every aspect of life on behalf of the king. it was never about getting rid of a single, individual king. there were literally hundreds of people in line at any given time. it was just like today, and it seemed just as impossible.
This is more about removing the system than the individual. People believed that the right of kings was divine, and when you believe that, it’s hard to argue for anything else.
You can remove a king, but can you remove the concept of a single person ruling over a territory?
Kim Jong Un isn't a king, but he is a single individual ruling over North Korea. Putin isn't a king, but he has the powers of one. Then there are examples from history like the Roman Republic, and the Weimar Republic.
IMO governments are basically a hierarchy where if things become "stable" enough, you can replace one with another one higher up the hierarchy. But, without work, they'll eventually collapse into something lower down the hierarchy.
At the bottom of the hierarchy you have violent anarchy, where nobody is in charge and various groups are all vying for power. If things become stable enough, one powerful person (or small group (often headed by one person)) can take charge, and you get an autocratic / dictatorship type system. If the dictator is removed, you will often descend back into violent anarchy. But, if things get stable enough, sometimes you can replace that dictator with a kind of republic, either something like a constitutional monarchy, or a democratic republic. The former dictator might become a figurehead while power is held by a medium sized group who is elected by the public. If you don't take care, that kind of system can devolve into an autocratic one, where one person holds absolute power. You might still have elections, but they don't really change anything.
So, even though the "divine right of kings" is mostly gone, that was just window dressing on an autocratic system. And, we can easily get back to that kind of a system now. In fact, many supposedly democratic places are backsliding towards that right now.
P.S. I think there's probably other forms of government higher up the hierarchy than democratic republics / constitutional monarchies. We should be trying to get there, instead of assuming that a democratic republic is the best possible system in the world. But, at the same time, we need to guard against allowing a democratic system to backslide into becoming an autocracy.
Kim Jong Un is definitely a king, whatever he calls himself.
He's the hereditary ruler of a state that maintains its grip with the personal loyalty of the military.
Let's replace the king in this example with religion then. It's pretty much removed or at least had lost the power it had just 100 years ago
And yet the Christian fascists run rampant
Not really. I believe it's mainly only in the US this is the case
Capitalism, to some degree and in some form, is also a byproduct of scarcity. You can't really "depose" it without eliminating scarcity. You can just seek to use government action to remediate the ill effects of the process.
Modern "capitalism" (not really what Smith would recognize, if we're being honest) has found plenty of ways to manufacture scarcity. In fact, artificial scarcity and pipeline inefficiency is now the heart or where "wealth" is produced.
The agricultural industry is the perfect example of bullet point 3 gone so wildly out of control it'd make you scream. We produce so much food that the government subsidizes farms backing off on food production for valid conservation reasons. And yet 12.8% of Americans still fall under a category called "food insecurity", where they can not consistently afford/access a healthy diet.
Right, don't take my conjecture as a broad defense of the modern status quo. My point is that the forces which create capitalism, and then the injustice which arises from it are not as simple as many people on the internet seem to believe, nor are these things one in the same. Indeed, previous revolutionary attempts at "tearing down capitalism" all at once have done little to resolve the underlying injustices, and in many cases have simply created entirely new forms of injustice without actually improving, eg food scarcity, or improving egalitarian outcomes.
Capitalism itself is better viewed as one tool for mediating scarcity. It isn't the only tool available, nor does it guarantee an optimal solution, and I would definitely argue that the contemporary dogma surrounding it is quite harmful I'm many ways. But so is anti-capitalist dogma. The former dogma holds that hammers are the only tools in the world, while the latter seeks to ban hammers entirely because they may be misused. Both are very clearly wrong. The correct middle ground is understating the inevitability of hammers will persist until the last nail has been driven, but that you should not use hammers to drive screws.
I personally think this is self evident and that most reasonable people will understand this. However the extremists in both camps are unfortunately quite vocal.
I think I agree with in many cases, except that I think some anti-capitalism dogma is helpful.
Why? Because while I don't think the answer is simple, I think many of the pillars and assumptions of capitalism make it the worst way to distribute resources and solve resource issues. Capitalism presumes everyone is going to be selfish but that they will somehow be selfless or stupid enough not to game the system enough to break it. Smith believed in the importance of regulation, but seemed as blind as the rest on how a system that presumes everyone will focus on themselves first can maintain reasonable regulations in the first place. In that sense, it has failed fairly consistently for centuries, where other systems (even some that appear capitalist to the naked eye) have done better.
Ironically, capitalism worked better when there were nobles who were half-beholden to it and some were half-beholden to other more blurry requirements, like a sense of duty to their people. I think a system that demands a little selflessness, however, has just shown to work better. Nobody's saying we go full socialist, but putting supply and demand on top of a foundation of social programs seems more effective than putting a few social programs on top of an anarcho-capitalist wetdream.
And the answer, I think, is that we need to be somewhere a bit more distant from the middle-ground, allowing free trade only after life and health are covered. Of course, like everyone else, I don't know everything and not everyone would agree with me.