The folks over at More Right agitate for a monarchy, though their path from here to there seems to leave something to be desired. I suspect they are engaging in massive battles on twitter, for they don't appear to allow comments on their blog. Monarchies shall not spring forth from one hundred and forty characters. Instead, I suspect I have seen a few people who aren't interested in monarchy, per se, at all. They are interested in growing healthy food- Paul Wheaton and Joel Salatin spring to mind.
The process of buying land and trying to put it in sustainable production inevitably leads to systems that begin to seem reminiscent of more ancient, and as the More Right folks suggest, more correct forms of government. Indeed, Paul Wheaton has run the veritable hippy gamut of all sort of communal systems and has decided that the only thing that works for a community is one person must rule, so he jokingly calls all his enterprises his evil empire.
So, it occurred to me that if you are like the folks at More Right, and you want an aristocratic class to rise, and perhaps even achieve a monarchy, then you should be against intellectual property. By artificially valuing the intellectual, you devalue actual property. The aristocrats had actual property- authors, inventors, musicians, etc...- are a middle class lot. Things are even more complicated now, due to so many corporations owning intellectual property.
As always, the primary problem is this zombie republic, long dead, animated by political greed alone. It will instinctively strike out against any legitimate form of authority. Intellectual property can even be seen as part of a systematic attempt to keep a natural aristocracy from forming. By legislating all sorts of 'property' they can create a false economy and draw wealth, value, prestige, away from people with potential.
I think this is an example of a principle- i.e. intellectual property is not property and therefore shouldn't be invented by government to transfer wealth from everyone. Intellectual property hurts everyone- we know it hurts the poor, but since the nobility has all but been stamped out, and all our 'elites' are bureaucrats, we don't think about what the effects would be to the nobility. Intellectual property seems quite fine to the bureaucrats- indeed it expands their franchise. But to a monarch?
A monarch shouldn't decree intellectual property on principle, and as I have suggested, he shouldn't allow it because it is bad for himself.
It seems some of the folks at More Right argue the monarch should be able to do anything, yet clearly some of the things monarchs have done in the past have helped destroy their realms. One wonders what could have been done in Austria, with the initiators of the Austrian school of Economics right there and the Hapsburgs desperately needing clarity. It should not be underestimated how much the traditional leaders floundered for lack of principle as industrialization took hold. They operated out of what they knew, past experience, but what worked reasonable well for populations eking out an existence on the land did not work as people migrated into industrial work. It was relatively easy for the industrialists to gain the ear of the monarchs and get concessions that were ultimately unfair to the poor and probably contributed to the monarch's eventual demise. The pro-growth, pro-industrial policies exemplified by the Trans-Siberian Railway, in hindsight, seem to have contributed to the demise of monarchy. There were all sorts of excuses to mistreat the poor worker, and to secure assets from the state (which ultimately weakens the monarch) in order to drive the engine of industry forward.
Principle makes the prince. Anything else is pointless.
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