Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Monarchy and Libertarianism

Will the real tyrant please step forward?

I am periodically asked how I reconcile monarchism with my libertarian leanings.  The answer is that I don't see the two as irreconcilable and historically monarchies have been far closer to the libertarian ideal in practice than virtually all of the so called "liberal" democracies.  With the caveat that we are not talking about the peculiar brand of libertarianism that is a thinly disguised anarchism, for which there is no form of government that is acceptable, ever.  And with the further caveat that there have certainly been some abusive monarchies; I would make a few broad brush observations about life in countries governed by a monarch.

In general as long as one refrained from treason and sedition or overtly trying to undermine the established church, paid your taxes (which in most monarchies were a pittance by today's democratic standards), and refrained from those crimes against persons and property that are universally proscribed in any orderly society, you were very likely to be left alone.  Point in fact, many people went through their entire lives with little or no contact with the government.

Historically governments in monarchies were almost always much smaller than those which exist in today's enlightened democratic world.  The influence of the Imperial Russian Autocracy on the ordinary lives of its hundred million or more subjects was minimal.  Most historians of pre-revolutionary Russia argue that the country was ridiculously under-governed.

This is not to argue that monarchy is a perfect system.  No form of government run by humans is. But even when you had a bad monarch (not as common as many left-wing academicians would have us believe) the impact on ordinary people not closely connected to the court or the capital was often low. Consider that while many monarchies were at one time in theory autocratic, in reality such was rarely the case.  Monarchical power was constrained by tradition custom and usage, by the precepts and moral authority of the Church and by an aristocracy that did not want its own position threatened by an overreaching monarch.  And the really horrible monarchs (extremely rare but there were a few) often became accident prone and wound up flying out of upper floor palace windows or dying of acute strangulation in their bed.  Granted it's not as neat as an election but it worked.  Finally, how many horrible monarchs have there been versus all of the lousy presidents we keep electing in continuous succession?

Or to put it another way; which government is more onerous, the one we live under now or the one under George III that our forebearers fought to overthrow?  I will give you a hint; George III could never have even dreamed of the authority to have any of his subjects assassinated by royal decree.  And if you think the royal taxes we revolted over were high I am guessing you haven't had much contact with the IRS in the last half century.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

The whole thesis is flawed - the age of monarchy was winding down as modern industrial organization was gaining ascendency: the modern state is an industrial state, democratic or not. Libertarianism today is a mask for the rape of society by the managerial class.

In any case, Hans Hoppe was an anarchist and defender of monarchy - his papers make a (similarly ahistorical) case along the same lines. No reason to set an arbitrary limit on how far to take a bad idea.

The Anti-Gnostic said...

"Libertarianism today is a mask for the rape of society by the managerial class."

A truly ignorant comment. Democracy enables a scale of rent-seeking, regulatory capture and transfer payments that monarchs could only dream about.

Anonymous said...

I love my country, and thank God for its liberties and good points.

But, if one sets aside the necessary hype for getting a rebellion going, hype which has now assumed mythological status, there was little real justification for the American Revolution. The identification of the King as an oppressor was more politically convenient than it was accurate (at least until he -- fulfilling his office and oath -- raised troops to put down an unlawful rebellion, as any head of government would and should do). But it just wouldn't have had the same "ring" to shout against Parliament.

Ochlophobist said...

There are so many factors in play when considering these comparisons across time.

Monarchical power was constrained by tradition custom and usage, by the precepts and moral authority of the Church and by an aristocracy that did not want its own position threatened by an overreaching monarch.

It was also constrained (relatively speaking) by technology. Many modern technologies require vast bureaucracies and require large concentrations of capital. To rule a substantial population/area through any political means today requires a great deal more means of production (or tons of cash) than what monarchists needed to have generally to maintain their normative levels of control. This is especially true if you don't want to be ruling a rogue nation or a vassal nation today. Seeing the photos of the North Korean missile control center this morning, with 1960s looking telephones on the tables, reminded me of that.

But the further problem with the comparison is that it has a very limited view of freedom. In your post, it would seem that human freedom is determined by the degree to which a govt limits activity, or how much taxation and regulation is directed at individuals. So your lesser aristocrats and middle class and peasants under most European monarchies didn't interact much with the monarchist state, and didn't pay much in taxes, and weren't much regulated, so thus they were more free.

But this is, of course, a very limited view of freedom. Our technologies, say the car and the airplane which allow us to travel three states away in one day (or in one hour), and our health care, which allows us to live past that first heart attack or bout of appendicitis, grant us levels of freedoms. And those technologies require levels of bureaucracy and regulation which were unheard of even 100 years ago. Where the regulation comes from (business, gov't, some independent outfit like United Laboratories) doesn't matter - it must happen to be able to provide technology consistently on a large scale. Even if the U.S. govt becomes twice as authoritarian as it currently is, humans living in the U.S. today are, in the aggregate, far more free overall than virtually anyone living under pre-modern European monarchies. Remember that most peasants might not have interacted with the gov't at all, but they were often very constrained by their landlords or whomever they happened to serve or do business with. Your usual peasant could not choose his career, marry or shack up whenever he/she wanted with whomever he/she wanted, travel 4 states over, take vacation, talk back to the boss (or lord) without fear of starvation (or worse), or choose a home, or get a hunting licence and hunt in the local woods. While the state may be much more authoritarian today, the actual freedoms of most persons are greatly expanded. This is in part due to technologies, and in part due to social and legal factors which include the expanded social expectation of these freedoms by the breadth of the population.

Ochlophobist said...

- cont'd -

George III may not have had the legal right to assassinate his subject, but if one looks at the real options, the functional freedoms that most of his subjects have, and compare them to what most Americans are free and able to do today, the difference is vast. Virtually no one wants to go back to the former situation, and the current situation requires vast bureaucracies and regulatory structures. My fear with popular American libertarianisms is that they seem to rely on "Jeffersonian" style postures which assume an agrarian context and are simply not applicable in a world in which we want to maintain Fed Ex, and heart bypass surgeries, and WalMart, and Toyota Priuses, and pasteurized milk, and Netflix streaming. You catch a glimpse of this when Ron Paul, in response to questioning about how to run health care after getting rid of Medicare (which he supports doing), starts talking about how elderly and poor patients were routinely treated for free back when he was a young man, and that doctors then knew they had a social responsibility to do such. That is sorta kinda true, but that was also an age before routine lawsuits, and as my mother, an RN since 1966, will tell you, doctors were treated like little gods back then and routinely treated people horridly with no worries. My father's mother's cousin was a small town doc in Arkansas in the 50s and 60s and he routinely gave blacks worse care than whites, even when they did pay. But of course, having systems which can maintain some basic level of standard care requires bureaucracy, requires regulation, etc. The vast majority of Americans, myself included, don't want to go back to a situation wherein a health care provider can get away with today what they could get away with in the 1950s. But that requires oversight, and oversight requires some people telling other people what they can and can't do. But when considering the question of freedom this gets complicated. Are doctors less free today because of legal and regulatory constraints? Yes, of course. But patients have a great deal more choice when it comes to medicine today, and they have a great deal more leverage at play when dealing with doctors. Gov't has limited the at work freedom of doctors, and this in some cases limits the freedoms of some patients (in some states the poor are not free to receive charitable freedoms directly from docs, and even where this is possible the liabilities are now tremendous), but overall most patients are now more free with regard to their care (assuming they have access to it) than they were in the 50s. So I guess the real questions are what freedoms we want and don't want, and at what cost?

Stephen said...

There's another element to be considered here, one that often goes overlooked and undervalued. I'm thinking of activities that heretofore were conducted only between individuals and may have been illegal (such as gambling), but then the government takes it over and makes it "legal", with no change in the real moral value of the activity. In fact, these things somehow take on a higher moral status once they are made "legal" by the government, and the government may have condemned them only until they were under government control.

Anonymous said...

You know why would an American want a monarchy?
In the countries which lost a monarchy in 1917-1918, there are no more monarchistic tendencies. I live in a place which in 1910 was part of the Russian Empire, I am writing from a part of the former Russian Tsarat. I don't want to return to monarchy.

I don't think about the big picture, for me, my voivodship, my parish, my village, my county are the most important.

I don't care about what they say in Warsaw if it doesn't effect me. I don't care that I live 150 miles from the Ukrainian border, as long as they don't attack us everything's okay.

Look at the little picture.

St. Thomas Aquinas was raised in a democracy, the Apostles' lead a democracy, the Orthodox episcopate is a democracy, Orthodoxy is an aristocratic not monarchist religion, the Russian Orthodox Church Synod is half-bureaucrat, half-democratic body..

Stephen L said...

Unless of course you wanted to practise a minority religion quietly in your own home. Oh I get it, that's "overtly trying to undermine the established church".

Or have homosexual sex. Maybe that falls under "those crimes against persons and property that are universally proscribed in any orderly society".

Not quite sure where serfs or other effective or official slaves fall into your judgement, but I guess they don't really count.

Also probably best not to be an overly attractive woman living too close to the royal palace.

Visibilium said...

I hope that everyone had a good Easter.

Och had a nice point about capital concentrations in his comment, but here's my take on it. Fully-fanged, Hobbesian monarchs would be destined to remain economic small fry for the same reason as banks organized as general partnerships are becoming ever-smaller fish in a big pond. Their abilities to raise capital are constrained by their self-reliance. Hoppean monarchs must rely on themselves or their lackeys to maximize the present discounted value of their monarchies, and general partnerships have to rely on partners for additional capital. Large-scale and progressive capital formation can be present only with widespread property ownership. Hoppe's larger point is that State regulation isn't necessary in such an environment since the owners themselves would provide the regulation. Interestingly, the Jeffersonian ideal of a freeholder-run State isn't too far from Hoppe's point.

I tend to favor a freeholder requirement for sufferage, which thankfully would exclude most bloggers, but I'm willing to listen to contrary views.

Theodore Harvey said...

Great blog post. I am not exactly a libertarian but I am a monarchist. I would like to respond to the claim that monarchies were freer than modern states only because they were constrained by lack of 20th-century technology. This argument is disproved by the French Revolution. The Jacobins in the 1790s had no more technology available to them than the Bourbon kings they replaced. Yet the revolutionary State immediately became much more oppressive and brutal than the ancien regime had ever been, on a horrifying scale. The forces of Democracy and Republicanism are inherently more oppressive than traditional monarchies whether they have modern technology or not. When they do, the results are even worse. But it will not do to blame all the shortcomings of modern republican regimes on industrialization and technology.