« Reply #4 on: May 04, 2011, 08:46:05 AM »
I hate to posit this but I think Hoppe was groping in the dark for a "new spin" on limited government and landed on the royalty bandwagon. Hollywood and popular literature have always lauded good kings as the ones who listen to their constituencies (not the aristocrats in the court) and nothing could be farther from historical truth. Kings and queens never cede power of their own volition but only when forced. They are always the first to pick up the sword and start slashing whoever threatens their power.
I love Shakespeare and I love Henry V (I even still have my dog-eared and ancient pocket leather copy I traipsed around the world with while slaying dragons for King and Country). Henry was a power hungry psychopath in reality and no different than the long line of royals following.
We just saw The King's Speech and I really enjoyed it but it was fantasy. This was the same George VI who presented a Sword of Stalingrad to Stalin at Tehran. During WWII, Heinrich Mueller, Gestapo chief characterized the Royals thus:
He said the members of the British royal family were inbred imbeciles who married their own cousins and produced children with the intellect of chickens. He said the king -- that was back then -- was so stupid that if it weren't for his wife, he wouldn't take off his clothes when he bathed. That was George VI.
No King for me.
Logged
Gun control is mind control.
"So no more running, I aim to misbehave.” - Captain Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity, 2005
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling in terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (Chapter 1, "Arrest")
"...what kind of "historical truth" was [it] that needed the protection of massive fines and prison sentences to survive."
-Aubrey Waugh in The Daily Telegraph
"Je voudrais avoir deux armées: l'une pour l'affichage avec des armes magnifiques, les réservoirs, les petits soldats, les états-majors, des généraux distingués et gâteux, et chers petits officiers du régiment qui seraient profondément préoccupé par les selles de leur général ou des pieux de leur colonel, un armée qui serait indiquée pour une somme modique sur chaque champ de foire dans le pays. L'autre serait le vrai, entièrement composé de jeunes passionnés en uniformes de camouflage, qui ne serait pas mis sur l'affichage, mais dont les efforts du impossibles serait demandé et à qui toutes sortes de trucs seraient enseignés. C'est l'armée dans laquelle je devrais me battre."
- Jean Larteguy
" Of every One-Hundred men, Ten shouldn't even be there,
Eighty are nothing but targets,
Nine are real fighters...
We are lucky to have them...They make the battle,
Ah, but the One, One of them is a Warrior...
and He will bring the others back."
- Heraclitus
Ragnaroks!
