 Welcome to Mises Weekends. I'm Jeff Deist, and you may recall that a couple of weeks ago we did a show about the myth of democratic consensus. In other words, the increasing realization by people on both the left and the right in this country that democratic elections per se are not valid simply because one side or the other manages to get a few more votes for a preferred candidate. We also discussed how the concept of social contract theory is bunk. In other words, just because we live in the geographical confines of America does not mean that we somehow implicitly agree to abide by the outcome of democratic elections. And it's become increasingly apparent in a couple of weeks since that show that elites aren't even pretending any longer to care about democracy. Just a couple of days ago there were about 50 private jets assembled at a private island off the coast of Georgia for an AEI conference. Where some tech gurus and some GOP bigwigs got together and brainstormed ways to defeat Trump. Whom by all accounts is at least the consensus choice of GOP primary voters to date. So the real point of this weekend's show is not just that democracy creates bad results in society, ill-libertarian results because voters go out and vote themselves other people's money or other people's stuff. The point of this weekend's show is that democracy is fundamentally and inherently incompatible with human liberty. In fact, true democracy is found in the marketplace where we go out and deal with each other as voluntary actors. It's never found in force and governance. So this weekend we feature a relatively short clip about 10 or 12 minutes of the great Hans Hermann Hoppe as he discusses portions of his book Democracy, The God That Failed. And of course Hoppe is entirely correct in the early 21st century is actually the democratic voter who may well be the greatest threat to liberty in our lifetime. So stay tuned for a great talk with Dr. Hans Hermann Hoppe. Something that I have dealt with extensively in my book Democracy, The God That Failed, where I make an attempt to rehabilitate traditional monarchies as compared with democracies, not so much in order to show that that is the non-plus ultra, but to show that monarchies are relatively superior over democracy, traditional monarchies. Again, if you look at history, what we see there is of course the time when monarchies were basically abolished or became merely ceremonial institutions that is after World War II and compares that with the time when traditional monarchies were, so to speak, the dominant form of government that is before the outbreak of World War I and even more so, of course, before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The facts are clear. The democratic world that we have now 20 centuries, of course, wealthier than the monarchical world of the 19th and 18th century. The question, however, is that because of democracy or is it in spite of democracy? And you know, the standard line that we hear, of course, is it is because of democracy, because democracy is, of course, the greatest of all inventions. Interestingly, by the way, this is a very new phenomenon that people believe in this nonsense. If you go back in all of political theory, you don't find a single major thinker who had ever thought more about democracy than democracy being some sort of moderate communism. So it was always considered to be the most lousy of all political organizations. It could possibly only work in very small places. Even Rousseau, the most fanatic advocate of democracy, thought that could only work in small places because in small places everybody would control all the other people. And the instinct of people to loot the property of people who have more than themselves could be curtailed by this direct social control. But this curtailing, of course, never works if you have millions and millions of people making up the society. So even the most dramatic advocate of democracy, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, would consider what we have now in terms of democracy as idiotic as idiotic can be. So now, only one argument to show you how wrong this interpretation is that the transition from monarchical governments to democratic governments is responsible for the increase in wealth. My thesis is, if we would have retained traditional monarchies, we would be infinitely richer now than we actually are. Why is that? From an economic point of view, the transition from traditional monarchs to democratic rulers is nothing else but the transition from somebody who regards the country as his own property to somebody who regards the country as something of which he is the temporary caretaker. He is not the owner, he just takes care of it for a certain period of time. And now look at what the difference is between somebody who owns something and somebody who is a temporary caretaker of something. Just take the example of a house. In one case, I make you the owner of a house so you can pass it on to the next generation. You can sell it in the market anytime you want. And in the other case, I make you a temporary caretaker of the house. You cannot determine who will be the next caretaker and you are not entitled to sell the house in the market and retain the income that you receive from the house yourself. Now, will that make a difference in terms of how you treat the house or the example of kings and democratic politicians, how you treat the country? And the answer is, of course, that makes a difference as day and night. In one case, as an owner, you are concerned on the one hand, yes, of course, I want to get high rental income out of it. But my second concern is always, what will, as a result of getting rental income out of the house, occur to the value of the stock of the house because I could sell it at any time in the market. You would not want to engage in capital consumption, for instance. You would not want to increase your rental income at the expense of a more than proportional drop in the value of the house. You also are by and large interested in passing on to the next generation, something that has at least retained the value, is possibly even more valuable than when you inherited it. This is what most parents do. What do temporary caretakers do? Temporary caretakers don't own the capital stock. Their interest is, I have to draw as much of current income out of this piece of capital, regardless of what will happen to the value of the capital stock. Even if the house afterwards is a ruin, but I have drawn a tremendous income out of it, then from my point of view, this is, of course, a great advantage. I must loot the country as fast as possible because what I don't loot now, I will not be able to loot in the future. The king does not have an attitude, I must loot the country as fast as possible because if I don't loot it as fast as possible, I will not be able to do it in the future. As a matter of fact, if he doesn't loot it as much, the value of his country will be higher and his heirs will get something better. Just look, for instance, at the attitude that kings had vis-à-vis debt that they incurred to the attitude that democratically elected caretakers have towards debt that they incurred. Kings were by and large held responsible for their debt. Even their heirs were not in all cases, but in many cases considered to be liable for the debt incurred by their parents. They had mortgaged some of the property and people were standing there to take it away from them if they wouldn't pay up their debt. That did not prevent them to increase their debt, especially during war time, but during peace time they usually drew down their debt. If you look at democratic politicians, the total debt goes up in war time and in peace time. They are not personally liable for it. There are always some suckers in the future that are liable for it. You would be literally stupid if you don't go continuously into debt, as our politicians of course all do, because the money that you take in, you can give out. You make plenty of friends and in the long run we are all dead. Who cares what happens in the future? So democratic politicians are short-run people. They are like little children. I have to have the fun right now, whereas kings tend to be behaving more like adults do. That there are sometimes exceptions I will not deny, but there is a fundamental structural difference. If we would have never introduced democracy, but would have stayed and kept traditional monarchies, strong powers of the monarch, our standards of living would be infinitely higher than they currently are. To this result you can also only come if you use economic theory. An historian would never come up with this idea. An historian just simply looks at 19th century poor, 20th century rich, 20th century democracy, 19th century monarchy, accordingly monarchy crap, democracy, great. That's it. That's how historians operate. And I'm telling you, for somebody interested in economic theory, history is a minefield of ridiculous interpretations. Over and over and over, they report the facts right, but the interpretations that they give is sometimes you roll in bed and can't stop laughing. Okay, thank you very much.