There’s a funny story–possibly apocryphal–about how the fuel in nuclear reactors came to be called “piles.” The way I heard it, Enrico Fermi was showing off his new, experimental reactor to some of his benefactors, and they asked him what he called it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fermi, lacking a cool or new name to call it, said it was a “pile,” and the name stuck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I get the feeling that the same thing is happening with people reading Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the book, Hoppe goes over the incentives that monarchs have, compared to democratically-elected political leaders, and concludes that monarchs have better incentives that are more forward-looking. Fair enough. I think his points are solid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem is that this ignores one of the implications of monarchy, namely that most monarchs in history attained their “ownership” through conquest, which political theorists<\/a> began to recognize as illegitimate only in the late seventeenth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This implication colors people’s perception of what monarchy is, whether we like it or not. Therefore, when we say “Hoppean Monarchy,” the average member of the public thinks of a guy with a crown who claims ownership of some territory by conquest, as well as powers such as taxation, conscription, etc. of people within that territory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n