Would America Be Better Under a King?

And this one had the word democracy in it, so I just went to it. Uh American and this this one is shocking because it's like I I was like, well, yeah, where is our audience at? And it shows that uh, you know, they're very much kind of with us in general, but America would be better under a king than under universal uh democracy. Both you and I agreed, and the audience was at something like 77%, I think it was. So uh obviously we can just move on, I guess. Right, yeah. I mean, we're we're all good hoppians here, right? Yes, okay. So if you've ever read Democracy the God That Failed, and I imagine many of you have, uh, the thing you want to know about Democracy the God that failed is that as much as I love Hopp and I respect him, he is the very best libertarian, uh, but he is directly ripping off a guy uh who I absolutely love named Bertrand DeJuvenal in his book on power.

Um the first two-thirds of that book are basically him kind of photocopying, photocopying on power and then kind of putting some libertarian stuff in there, which is good. I like I like the time preference stuff, that's a good update to it. But ultimately, the reason he's the best libertarian is he understands the construction of power. He actually has a theory of power that many libertarians do not have. And uh so when we talk about democracy, we know that one of the things that allows is for the scaling of the state. Uh ultimately the idea that the people are speaking, that there is the consent of the governed, did not limit the power of the state. It grew it. Because you might not like the king, you might even oppose the king. It might be dangerous to oppose the king, but it is forbidden to oppose everyone.

Your neighbor. That's their public idea. That's their idea as a uh you know uh uh constituted people. And who are you to ultimately fight back against that? And so uh both both Hoppe and uh and Bertrand DeJuvenal walk you through how the growth of state has also uh been synonymous with the grow the growth of popular sovereignty. And so uh, you know, I don't want to rehash all those arguments here. If you want me to do that, I do it in my book. Uh but uh ultimately I do think that uh that they are both correct about this, that democracy is the enemy of freedom. Uh, you know, not to reference Peter Peter Thiel here, but you know, you're not wrong. That that ultimately democracy is an enemy of liberty, not the other way around. Yeah, I yeah, I mean, so well, I think democracy is an enemy of liberty.

I don't think that necessarily leads to the conclusion that a king is better. I actually still find this one still a little bit dicey. Um, you know, the thing that ultimately makes me feel that a king is better is like, well, most of what I don't like is produced via democracy, whereas the entities with kings, you know, uh, for example, we we ordered a bunch of sandwiches uh tonight from Nadu's sandwich shop. Nadu sandwich shop has a king. It's uh he is unelected. Uh and he runs the entire place by diktat, and no one has any vote at all. There's no democracy. Uh, you just choose whether you go into the restaurant or not, you know, and and uh uh this to me is probably I'm not a utopian, uh, but it's probably the closest we can get to utopia, you know. Restaurants treat me a lot best a lot better than the government does, you know.

And so I you know, David Friedman has a quote uh that uh you know the ideal form of society is where you have uh you know no say on what's on the menu, but every say on where you eat. Yes. And now that may be a little untethered for you, uh, but uh this I I think uh competition and choice are a far better check on misabused power, uh, you know, or tyranny or whatever you want to call it than democracy uh is just democracy just does not appear to be able to check these things. Democracy, uh I call it the scariest graph of uh, you know, in the world, which is the graph of percentage of GDP that's controlled by every Western democracy, and it's just nothing but a straight upline for a hundred and twenty years of of history, uh, to the point that every Western democracy, you know, more than fifty percent of our lives, of our work lives anyway, are controlled by the government.

We could debate what portion of our private lives are controlled by them. Uh and so, you know, democracy just it it doesn't create freedom to me. That doesn't mean that I want a king, you know, as uh something at the Free State Party we call ourselves uh, you know, we're we're performing these governance experiments. I don't think king or democracy are necessarily the choices. I would like to believe that there's something better than either of them, but democracy is clearly not the answer, and uh, you know, I would try a king at this point. This is why the libertarian pipeline always ends in neo-reaction. You know, the the final step of every libertarian is realizing that you actually just need totalitarianism on the outside so you can have libertarianism on the inside. And so this is why Curtis Yarvin famously came up with this construction of the patchwork idea, right?

Where you would have infinite amount of exit but no voice. You don't get to vote. There is always a king, but you get to decide where you are. You get to decide what system you get to involve yourself with. Now that's a there are problems with that as well. We don't have time to get into all that. But long story short, I'm just saying it's a it's a natural evolution to recognize that ultimately once once you grasp that the people are never sovereign and that there is always an elite, then there has to become a certain set of choices that you make if you want to maximize liberty.