Imagine having a monarchy in 2024, how utterly ridiculous would that be? But we do, we have a person who in April 2023 became the King of England, ascended to the throne to rule the country as a figurehead of government, that is, according to the Hobbesian argument (leviathan) and many other arguments before his, a necessary stabilising force in the structure of the country.
We have established democratic governments in western societies, and although they are not perfect (they are far from perfect), they are much superior to the idea that there are people capable of being born with nobility and holding, by-birth, the right to rule over their fellows. It remains true that money is a factor that enables power, as it has always been, and the accumulation of it allows for persons to cede the power of it to their descendants so that they may wield it too, but money is not a thing that has power, it is a means of power, each British pound has the same power as each other British pound.
Nobody ever gets rich by working hard or by being good at what they do, unless they are sportsmen, or what they do is be a pioneer of something. People are rich by owning things, the labour of others, land or other valuable commodities that are immutable. Big ears is now the largest private land owner on the planet I believe, and as so he is immeasurably wealthy, and that wealth enables power. He does not use that power though because his wealth is granted in a relationship long established between his family and the nominal power of the British parliament that ensured that his ancestors were not beheaded in a revolution (like happened in other countries). If he were to encounter a republican leaning prime minister with a large support base in the form of the people, and therefore a mandate for a republic rather than this current nonsense, he could lose all power, all land, and all riches I suppose. What his and his family’s riches could do is to feed the starving in the lands he owns, house the homeless on the lands he holds, exactly what it never does. In the Pandemic of 2020-2023 the crown put up no palaces for use as hospitals, what they did when Britain appealed for people with spare rooms for Ukrainian refugees was that they didn’t offer a single one.
We should think ourselves rather silly for continuing to support this ridiculous and outdated institution that does no good outside of being a tourist attraction. Even if the royal family was just that, a tourist attraction, it would not need to have an actual family playing those roles, we could consign them to history and use that history as the decoration of the palaces as public spaces run by the National Trust. The most visited city in the world is Paris, the most visited attraction there is the palace of Versailles, and France hasn’t had a royal family since Louis XVI was beheaded in 1793.
Silly, argue with me….
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