Rent-Seeking: The Downfall of Monarchy

The worst advocates for capitalism are the capitalists, assuming you define capitalists as people who have capital. The capitalists too soon reach the point where they shift from trying to make a profit via doing business to making a profit via rent-seeking- i.e. using the state to enforce an advantage, create imaginary property rights, etc...

So it wasn't long that a capitalist would show up, cap in hand, to whatever royal court was left about, and lobby. What was good for the capitalist was good for the nation! Surely we need a train through Siberia! And, if industrialization is in the national interest, surely the worker's constant harping about living conditions and violation of rights isn't?

This is where I think most of the royals made a fatal error; they listened to capitalist politicking, which inevitably destroys actual capitalism due to the fact that politics, as long as it exists as a viable alternative, is usually a cheaper way to get stuff- as long as we still have stuff to go around. This is not a sustainable situation, because capitalism is the only way to produce the stuff that we need.

Capitalists, of course, should know better, but the payoff was high, so they expanded parliaments around the world, over-emphasized nationalism (creating international 'races' in almost everything in order to garner more license from their governments), and weakened the pre-existing order considerably. Indeed, the democratic revolutions probably could not have destroyed a robust hierarchy; instead they did the equivalent of setting a torch to the old folk's home while seizing the shiny new building the capitalists had made for themselves.

And middle management inherited the earth, at least for now.