Potemkin wrote:All this talk about whether monarchies or democracies have more or fewer regulations is meaningless. Modern democracies, for the most part, have something closely approximating a free market (whether heavily regulated or not; usually not), whereas European monarchs would hand out monopolies to their favourite courtiers just because they had played the lute particularly well at that banquet last night and amused His Royal Mightiness. Aloisius Popinjay III would end up being the only merchant permitted by law to import, say, tobacco into the monarch's realm. The fact that his little racket was not regulated is irrelevant; he was running a fucking monopoly, by royal decree no less. This has nothing to do with free markets or entrepreneurship. Absolutely nothing whatsoever.
Let me just be clear. I am not a libertarian and I am not arguing that monarchies are more free-trade. I am actually quite opposed to free-trade, I am a neo-mercantilist who has no problems with nepotism or imperial charters...or even theocratic oppression for that matter.....what PoD and I are bickering about (and quite pointlessly as all conversations I have with him usually are), is whether or not monarchies were intrusive into the lives of individual citizens via regulations on a level equal or greater than that of representative governments today. he seems to concede the point that this is historically true but argues it was merely a historical coincidence as he equates nearly all regulations with scientific advancement and argues the reason monarchies had fewer regulations was not implicit in the form of government itself but in its scientific backwardness.
I responded that this can only be demonstrated by a comparison of modern democracies v. modern monarchies to see if this, in fact, is the case. I have not done that research yet and so I do not have a definitive answer at this time.
This whole thing was brought up by a discussion of the thesis of Kuhnheldt-Leiden in his work "
Liberty of Equality?" who argues that monarchies are self-interested authoritarian hierarchies that are not totalitarian either in the sense of mob-totalitarianism as in representative government, or as in individual totalitarianism as in the case of Hitler or a mao. Rather, he argues that the preservation of family rule in governance has typically required the monarch to avoid the intrusive behavior of regulation that is common in "democratic societies" today in order to prevent rebellion and overthrow.
He makes some compelling points, and he sees a direct connection between democratic and totalitarian institutions (much based on his experience as an Austrian who witnessed the rise of Hitler out of democratic institutions).
I don't agree with his libertarianism or his romantic view of Catholicism (or much of his religious analysis at all). But he is undoubtedly a brilliant and underrated and highly original political theorist.
I'll link, this most unusual book, here again:
https://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Equality ... r+equality