In 1776, Thomas Paine made the best case for fighting kings −and being skeptical
Another example: the Duke of Westminster is worth $12B and owns a large chunk of London outright, including a ton of large, notable buildings. (Also, I think, the Twinings tea company.)
There's the Crown Estate, which is controlled by the crown, but the family also owns the Duchy of Cornwall (45K acres) and the Duchy of Lancaster (45K acres), as well as numerous private holdings that are less visible. And this is predominantly highly developed city space.
The UK benefits from the royal family allowing the use of their land, including historic buildings, at a relatively low cost.
How does the UK benefit from the royal family allowing this, rather than just having a non-monarchist government that does the same thing?
if you get one stupid person in as king they could sell everything off
Thats the point, its not trivial to sell it off, because it was set up to counteract a fooling king in exchange for a stipend.
This system was explicitly designed to take an asset from the crown and place it in trust so that the king could get a steady income, ostensibly from assets that had unpredictable income.
Thus the crown estate was born, which has a bunch of rules, most notably about taking on debt.
Also, they provide a lot of face-time for the government. They show up at a lot of events, the kind of thing for which you might hire a celebrity to give it a sense of occasion. The actual dollar value of that is hard to estimate, and it's less valuable than the tourism, but the fact that people still want it suggests that it's providing something of value.
Personally, I like having a figurehead head of state that is subject to a directly elected Parliament.
The King may have cerimonital power but he can never exercise it. As was proved in the Glorious Revolution we can remove our head of state anytime we like.
I would much rather see the House of Lords reformed than the monarchy ended.
> I would much rather see the House of Lords reformed than the monarchy ended.
I'd be very careful about that one. Making it elected would be a terrible idea. There are some reforms that are possible, but they'd need to be very narrow (for example, limiting the size, and limiting tenure).
In practice with a Hitler type he could dissolve the government and there'd be new elections. I guess if the people voted the same guy back that might be the end of it but it's a bit of a failsafe to this kind of thing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42943973
I wouldn't mind seeing the British monarchy get abolished as well.
Strongly suggest the USA leaves tinkering with other countries' political systems alone for at least a generation. No standing.
The British are actually quite conflicted about the monarchy.
It tends to be bound up in what a lot of people used to observe was the distinction between Royalism and Queenism (or Elizabethism specifically).
We don't much like the institution in the same way (only narrow approval overall), but we pretty much loved the Queen as close to unconditionally as we love anyone (she's like one or two rungs down from Judi Dench and the late Terry Wogan), and would not have wanted to see it go in her lifetime because it would just have been weird.
Now, not so much. Charles has yet to earn that kind of affection. Though surprisingly he is getting there, and Camilla's popularity (always a very serious problem for the monarchy) is genuinely surprising because she turns out to be a) really a friendly, kind person and b) genuinely liked by her step-family.
I wonder if the monarchy serves that role for the UK. Might be better to keep it.
The only real way that the monarchy can survive is if the kingdom stays united.
Also, president boris, stamer or farage is just a humiliation I can't really cope with.
Also, president boris, stamer or farage is just a humiliation I can't really cope with.
The British royal family does get some bad press from time to time, but the recent string of British PMs really does serve to remind us all that the bar is really low :)
I live in France, our common mythology, our Roman National as it is called here, is that we beheaded our king. Yet, the most authoritarian people you know will still claim the legacy of our revolution, of De Gaulle and Jeanne d'Arc. Even worse, this mythology is poised as under threat by a made-up out-group and used to seed reactionary fear and divisiveness amidst our nation.
When you consider how many people and how much wealth was destroyed during/following revolutions like the French or Russian, and the compound interest of that wealth over 150 years, the pennies we pay to the royals todays is probably cheap.
Just saying, if you went back in time and opted for a revolution instead of a constitutional monarchy, you'd probably be poorer today -- compound growth over 150 years is no joke.
The problem with demonizing people is that demons are badass and powerful.
"The law is king!"
The 2024 Nobel prize in economics[1] was awarded to a team of three who investigated what causes a nation to prosper and identified "rule of law" as an essential ingredient[2].
[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2024/pre...
[2] https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-economists-daron-acemoglu-simo...
In your model you need the religious leaders to be aware of the ruse but still be benevolent actors. This is problematic because it makes selecting leaders from within the religion difficult (especially at lower ranks). By waiting to tell them the game many followers are likely to revolt as they've been told their entire lives and core beliefs are a lie. That risks collapsing the system. By pulling leaders from outside the faith you garner distrust from followers (maybe this could work if those members can be said to directly come from heaven rather, but that's difficult to pull off). By selecting from the followers and not revealing the ruse your system has no self realigning mechanism. In all instances you suffer from the effects of a game of telephone ("Chinese whispers"), but probably the most in the last case.
In all situations you are still vulnerable to the rise of fanatics. True believers of any philosophy can be dangerous, and the more power they possess (such as leadership) the more danger they possess. With competing religions you justify division between true believers. Even if the leaders of competing are not, the true believers will create that division and organize. A small population is all that is needed in order to upset the system.
I think you're right that there is utility to many aspects of religion (not just Christianity) but holy wars are still bloody wars. It's important to realize that these features can be met through other beliefs. Some of the greatest features are community, as organized religion forces common ground and people that have differing opinions in disjoint domains (e.g. shared religion, different politics) are forced to interact, which leads to lower tribalism (though not sub-tribes).
Maybe religion is a local optima, but it would be naïve to discount its flaws. By its nature it is dividing, even if at the same time it is unifying. Local and global structures need not be identical.
</sarcasm>
That's not to say that America doesn't have problems. That the problems aren't unique.
But there has always been problems, and they have always been new.
Over time America and the rest of the western world, will adapt and move on to new problems :)
Charlie Munger recalled it in 2003 as “Where there is no bread, there is no law; where there is no law, there is no bread.”
It's going to be some easy picking if more figure that out ...
Yeah, I think reminding people that you don't get prosperity without rule of law is a good idea.
He believed in a universal basic income (Agrarian Justice), free trade, a land value tax. He was a georgist before Henry George. To this day, I look at Georgism as the only meaningful pro-market and good-for-buisness but unapologeticly left-wing movement we have.
Thomas Paine should be regarded as our best and most read founding fathers and liberal thinkers. He's often a footnote, or forgotten about. Just like Andrew Yang, Henry George, Smedly Butler, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair etc.
Instead our modern "anti-authoritarian" movement, or whatever passes for it, claims ideologically descent and active influence from the likes of charlatans and defenders of authoritarianism like Karl Marx, Hegel, Freud, Foucault, Kant, Nietzsche, etc.
Remember Thomas Paine.
He believed in a universal basic income (Agrarian Justice)
I am, of course, only superficially familiar with his works, but calling what Paine proposed a basic income is extremely stupid.
This is a trivial concept of viewing territories as a natural resource, specifically, land, not productive assets in general. With the logic that land is not a product of human activity, and therefore, by acquiring land as "ownership", a person obtains it at the expense of everyone else, and it's logical to force them to compensate for this.
And it certainly can't be called a basic income if you look at the proposed tax burden. It's simply another form of tax redistribution, and in almost every respect, more capitalist compared to the tax distribution systems of that time, (and certainly of today).
that doesn't devolve into lunacy
I mean he did literally dissolve into lunacy. He also was shunned for his "blasphemous" views on the role of the church. He died in penury, and largely in disgrace.
But, he should be read more, the rights of man is surprisingly readable, especially given the time and subject matter.
We can only hope that Paine's approach will win out instead.
Congress has never folded power to a president like this before. The Supreme Court has never faced such backlash from district courts (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/11/us/politics/judicial-cris...). Scientists & researchers have never been up in arms about us health policy or what is being done. Colleges and universities have never been policed by a president, confronted with loyalty pacts.
But thanks to SCOTUS interpreting any amount of political gerrymandering as permissible, we may have in fact fallen into an irreparable hole in the US Constitution.
Even if some of us are disinclined towards tyranny, we may be faced with a choice: accept that we are shunted towards it by forces beyond our control, or roll over and accept tyrannical rule by others. I continue to hope that it will not come to that and that we can fight our way out of this situation using Paine's methods.
So then we're looking at a constitutional convention. Can you imagine our current crop of politicians cooperating to negotiate something which improves on the current Constitution? I'd expect a prisoner's dilemma with a defect-defect outcome and the winner taking all of the diminished spoils.
I think we're stuck with what we've got and we have to hope that enough voters are persuadable, allowing us to emerge from the hole.
Given that this kind of deference to a perceived authority (which manifests in hero worship, tribalism, influencers, religion, celebrity veneration, sports figures, etc) seems to be built into the very genetic fabric of 99% of the general populace I despair at ever seeing it end.
People simply can't wait to anoint their own personal king (be it Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, MrBeast, etc.)
People simply can't wait to anoint their own personal king
You really think there are only 1% of us that have no desire at all for any sort of king? I cannot think of a single person deserving of that role, cannot imagine what it would take for me to change my mind. I very much value our systems of government, and I do not ever want any one person to have too much control over them.
People Americans hoist into power (and many other countries do) often look like a poor man's replacement for a monarch. How many people in any country do actually lay claim to their own values and conscience? How many are genuinely emancipated and govern themselves?
In particular in this day and age where most of the wannabe kings are so obviously idiotic it's telling how eager people still are to subject themselves, sometimes in, as David Bentley Hart dubbed it crypto-erotic fashion, almost sadomasochistic and fully aware how incapable the demagogues are.
The fact that this point is largely lost on the audience of this site just shows how bad things have gotten.
People who want to amass power for its own sake need self-reinforcing systems that restrain them.
It’s impossible to successfully restrain another more powerful than you, by definition, as an individual.
And to do so as a group introduces the whole mess of politiking and intra-group dynamics that generates any significant power concentration in the first place.
this point is largely lost on the audience of this site
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
“What would America’s Founding Fathers think if they were alive today?”For Cross, it is pointless to speculate about the present-day views of men who could not have imagined cotton candy, let alone the machine that makes it.
Some things, like “taxation without representation” seem to be timeless. You can call it irony or perhaps in some cases, a spade is still just a spade.
>> men who could not have imagined cotton candy
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20150701005917/http://www.cotton...
The spacious firmament on high,
With all the blue etherial sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great original proclaim.
The unwearied sun, from day to day,
Does his Creator’s power display,
And publishes to every land
The work of an Almighty hand.
Soon as the evening shades prevail,
The moon takes up the wondrous tale,
And nightly to the list’ning earth
Repeats the story of her birth;
Whilst all the stars that round her burn,
And all the planets, in their turn,
Confirm the tidings as they roll,
And spread the truth from pole to pole.
What though in solemn silence all
Move round this dark terrestrial ball
What though no real voice, nor sound,
Amidst their radiant orbs be found,
In reason’s ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
THE HAND THAT MADE US IS DIVINE.