The recent royal wedding pushed Danny Sanchez to ask, why not use this nostalgia and popular acclaim as momentum to transfer some real power back to the House of Windsor?
Anyone who thinks such an idea is self-evident folly, he says, should read Hans-Hermann Hoppe on The Comparative Economics of Private and Public Government Ownership:
The defining characteristic of private government ownership is that the expropriated resources and the monopoly privilege of future expropriation are individually owned. The appropriated resources are added to the ruler’s private estate and treated as if they were a part of it, and the monopoly privilege of future expropriation is attached as a title to this estate and leads to an instant increase in its present value (“capitalization” of monopoly profit).
Most importantly, as private owner of the government estate, the ruler is entitled to pass his possessions onto his personal heir; he may sell, rent, or give away part or all of his privileged estate and privately pocket the receipts from the sale or rental; and he may personally employ or dismiss every administrator and employee of his estate.
In contrast, in a publicly owned government the control over the government apparatus lies in the hands of a trustee, or caretaker. The caretaker may use the apparatus to his personal advantage, but he does not own it. He cannot sell government resources and privately pocket the receipts, nor can he pass government possessions onto his personal heir. He owns the current use of government resources, but not their capital value.
Moreover, while entrance into the position of a private owner of government is restricted by the owner’s personal discretion, entrance into the position of a caretaker-ruler is open. Anyone, in principle, can become the government’s caretaker.
From these assumptions two central, interrelated predictions can be deduced:
- A private government owner will tend to have a systematically longer planning horizon, i.e., his degree of time preference will be lower, and accordingly, his degree of economic exploitation will tend to be less than that of a government caretaker; and
- subject to a higher degree of exploitation, the nongovernmental public will also be comparatively more present oriented under a system of publicly owned government than under a regime of private government ownership.
It’s not clear that giving the monarch back some executive power is quite the same thing as treating the country as a valuable asset whose managers should be governed by its owners.