duplicated
It is of course assumed that all the other variables are held constant. There’s no need to repeat ‘ceteris paribus’ all the time.
So…here’s an apodictic claim : “if phony credit is issued and taken, there will be malinvestments”.
An exclusive owner will take better care of his possessions ? Is that necessarily, logically so ? No it isn’t. Are you claiming that the alleged superiority of monarchy follows automatically from that ‘principle’ ? It doesn’t.
Okay, and I can say that a private owner who is mindful of profit will make better use of their holdings than one who is not a full, private owner and is mindful of profit, and this is apodictic too…
-Jon
Did Tsarist Russia implement a tax burden as high as the one in most social democracies today? Did Tsarist Russia give rise to all kinds of bureaus, tailored to protect the privileges of special interest groups and for that purpose, fed with robbed tax money? Did Tsarist Russia infringe upon the rights of property owners in any way close to what we face today?
No?
Well then I guess Tsarist Russia was more libertarian than today’s “free world”.
Yes, the tsars probably had slaves, and so did most of the Founding Fathers. An unpleasant habit of those days.
No, monarchies don’t automatically develop into libertarian family parks. But because monarchs have an inherent interest in the future revenue of their realms, they tend to prefer long-term investment to short-term spending. Thus, they raise less taxes. With less taxes raised, people have more resources at their disposal which can be used in mutually beneficial transactions, that is on the free market. That’s the whole point.
Another advantage of monarchy over democracy: in monarchy, leadership is determined by genetic lottery. You might get an incompetant prick, or you might get a relativly nice guy. With democracy, you can be assured one thing: the leader will be a maniplulative, decietful conman.
Any slightly critical eye will instantly see that the “checks and balances” in the Constitution guarantee nothing. The branches and individual politicians gain from collusion and gain nothing from competition.
Yet England’s feudal government, despite having no deliberate attempts to create “checks and balances”, had actual limits on the government. The king’s interests were in direct competition with that of the lesser lords. For the king to get richer the lords have to get poorer. This was real federalism, in contrast to our system today where the Feds tax directly and share the revenue with the States.
And I agree. What I don’t agree with is the idea that such theorem describes or applies to monarchy. To begin with, the idea that a person can ‘own’ 1/5th of the globe, and have power over a population of some 60 millions, of which 23 millions were almost slaves, is, to put it mildly, extravagant.
However, if you think that monarchs lawfully own ‘their’ countries and subjects, then I must ask, what theory of property rights do you believe in ? Certainly yours is not a lockean/libertarian theory of property rights ?
Worse than that : in Tsarist Russia 20 million people were forbidden to leave their hometowns, where they worked as agricultural slaves.
Of course. Or do you think that Russia was a haven of laissez-faire ?
Well, did I mention that more than 20 million people were virtual slaves ?
So, why did Russia remain the most backward country in Europe while the Anglo-Saxon world and Western Europe were experiencing the industrial revolution ?
Again - that is not necessarily so. A monopolistic robber, sorry, government, will raise taxes as much as he can get away with - and that upper limit probably depends on various different factors.
What makes you assume that Jon uses “privately owned” and “justly owned” interchangeably? I haven’t seen him do that.
I’m not sure who on this site believes that physical control is the same thing as “property”.
Can I quote that? Wait, I think I just did.
lol
I don’t assume it, that’s why I’m asking - and I hadn’t justice in mind anyway. What I want to know is whether we’re talking about ‘libertarian’ property, so to speak, or not.
To what extent did the Romanovs really own the state? As I recall, the abolition of serfdom was quite problematic.
No, the theory is, that a feudal monarch is constrained to a much greater degree than any democratic system, in specific, and that a private owner, as contrasted to a public, short-term custodian, will put the given resource to better use, no matter how much of it they control. No one is saying this is legitimate property, the question is economic, and as far as economics goes, private property exists when there is an exclusive, full right to the good in question. Democracy is essentially a form of socialism. I am at a loss why it cannot be seen that forms of government where the owner has exclusive rights over the current and future value of tax receipts will be less destructive than one where the owner has only a small breath of time in which to loot as much as possible, and where entry to the production of bads is open to all. A government can, should it wish, bankrupt the country in one go. Only, like any parasite, that’ll kill off its host in one blow, and permanently reduce its opportunities for exploitation. Now, praxeologically, where is this more likely? Where the owner can pass on title to the good in question and has full title to it, or where the owner is merely a temporary caretaker who will not pass on ownership, ceteris being paribus?
-Jon
Well, it was an absolute monarchy, more ‘absolute’ than the rest of western monarchies, no ? They could do almost anything they pleased. And the ‘nobility’ had the same kind of control over ‘their’ lands and serfs.
That was also a decision made by the owner of the state. Also, I got my numbers wrong. Out of 60 millions inhabitants, 50 millions were serfs of one sort or another.
To me that’s a problematic assertion. In a monarchy, the monarch has power over people - that’s the source of his ‘private property’. Such ‘property’ is fundamentally different from libertarian property, so, are you sure that the same economic principles apply ?
No doubt about that. And so is monarchy, in that the economic system of an absolute monarchy is totally monopolistic and centralized.
And I see no real difference between the two systems. A ‘democracy’ may be more totalitarian than a monarchy or vice-versa. Yes, the idea that a private owner of a country will/should run it in an efficient way sounds plausible, but in reality the idea is flawed.
Consider this : Taxes are stolen goods. Maximizing taxes means maximizing robbery. So a monarch who maximizes his ‘profits’ (taxes) is stealing as much as he can - doesn’t sound like an ideal situation to me. If he wanted to maximize his future earnings, then it would make sense for him to enact low taxes. But maybe he’s not concerned about future earning, for whatever reason ?
It was not a decision imposed easily, and so the monarchy could not be said to be absolute. It was a combination of monarchy and custom.
So…85% of the population was enslaved, but that was not absolute monarchy ? Interesting.
It was absolute monarchy, it shows that conservative theories about monarchy are wrong, and it led to communism. That should come as no surprise, of course, since monarchy is just another form of communism.
You’re denying the argument without providing any arguments of your own.
Obama is not preparing a Scrooge McDuck style vault that he plans to fill to the brim with as much plunder from the nation as possible before his term is over (if he gets elected).
Presidents are motivated by all sorts of reasons but they are not exactly Scrooge McDucks. Sure, they like money and they’re greedy parasitic bastards, but it’s not as if they get to keep all they money they’ve stolen after they’re done their term.
Any president is generally a tool of certain oligarchical special interests, a specific power elite. And while that power elite does change a bit it is generally fairly static. It certainly does not change with every election. Thus for Hoppe’s characterization of democracy to be correct we would have to see a change in the elite special interests every election.
I hope I don’t sound like a defender of democracy, but I think this particular attack on it isn’t so accurate.