 Let's just jump in with yesterday's news that the Queen Elizabeth II passed away. It was obvious early in the day, you know, I'm a news junkie, I listen to the news or not listen, read the news constantly during the day, whether on Google News or on all the different platforms that I use. And it was obvious early in the day that she was probably dying. Most were that just all her children and grandchildren were flying to Scotland and to the castle in Scotland where she was and doctors had said she was under observation. So it was obvious that something bad was happening. She passed away last, so yesterday. And of course the flags in the UK are flying at half-mast and we're going to have the next 10 days are going to involve these massive ceremonies of a state funeral. The British know how to put on a show. I mean they know how to put on a show, so they will put on a world-class funeral for Queen Elizabeth. And then there's a coronation. They're going to coronate, they're going to, we have a new king, King Charles III. I don't remember, King Charles was, I mean there's a, Charles I'm trying to think, there's something to do with the British history. I can't remember if it was Charles I or Charles II. The whole, God, if somebody remembers which of the Charles's was part of the whole answers they were both terrible. But that doesn't help me. But one of them was during the time of kind of the religious conflicts, Catholic Protestant was he a Catholic king and got kicked out and then, I can't remember, anyway. Yeah, okay, Charles I was beheaded by Cromwell, that's right. So Charles I was beheaded by Cromwell and then you had the Cromwellian Revolution, the Civil War and I don't know, I don't remember what Charles II was so maybe somebody can enlighten us about Charles II. Charles II restored the throne after Cromwell's, Cromwell was killed and Charles II was like, was floating with Catholicism and with alliance with the French and he got basically booted for William of Orange and there was the whole transition to William and Mary who became king. Anyway, British history is amazing. It's just amazing, the kings and queens and what they did and who killed who and who killed all their relatives. So you know, you could say, I mean, so anyway, we've got, I'll say what I want to say about Queen Elizabeth the Numeric, but so we're going to have a Charles III. Charles I and Charles II did not meet great fates. Charles I and Charles II, oh, I'm getting confused between Charles and James. James was the one who got booted for William of Orange, so I apologize. Anyway, Charles I did not end well. Let's hope Charles III is not killed in a religious revolution in the UK. I think the odds of that are pretty slim, although we'll talk about Charles. Charles is a bad dude, so we'll talk about Charles in a minute and what he brings to the monarchy and why we should be, if you live in England, you should be a little worried about Charles and hope his reign is not too long. I don't know much about William who comes after him, so I don't know if he's better, but Charles is pretty bad. Let's talk about Queen Elizabeth. Let me first say, and those of you who've listened to your own book show for a long time know this, I don't like monarchs. I don't like the idea of monarchy in the modern world. It's a leftover of feudalism. I know that in England and in Denmark and another place that have it, it is purely so. But ceremonial of what? What does it represent? It represents the feudal past. It represents a past in which they had power over the people and where it was not a good time, it was not pleasant and there was no freedom. So I don't like monarchies. I don't like the idea that you're born into a job and that you respected and admired and loved and feared and whatever because you're born into a job. I mean, that again strikes me as feudal in the days of the guilds where you were born to be a blacksmith and you were born to be this or born to be that. And it had nothing to do with merit or interest or passion or anything like that. You were born into it and in case of monarchy, it was just your duty. You had to be a king whether you liked it or not. Now you could abdicate the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II abdicated because he fell in love with a woman who at the time she was a divorcee and therefore that was unacceptable and he abdicated in order to marry her. But Queen Elizabeth, so much of what I know about Queen Elizabeth other than kind of just reading the news and following the news regularly as many of us do comes from watching the series The Crown. And one of the things that's most striking about The Crown because I think this is very realistic and true is that very early on Queen Elizabeth, she was a young queen. She became queen at the age of 26, I think very similar to Queen Elizabeth I. It was also very young when she became queen. But Queen Elizabeth II very early realized that she basically had a choice, a choice between living her own life, pursuing her own happiness and her own values or, and in that case having to abdicate, or doing a duty. And in that case she would be queen. And the consequence of being queen, which she encounters at least in the TV series but I think again has to be true to reality and is true to reality, the consequence of that is over and over and over again during her reign. There were circumstances in which her personal values came into conflict with her duty. And what makes I think the reason people revere Queen Elizabeth and love her so much is because she always placed duty above everything else. She followed the script. She was the opposite of self-interested. She served her country beautifully. She sacrificed whatever personal value she might have had in the name of that service. And she, you know, you could view this as her credit or not, she stuck to it until the age of 96. She didn't, she didn't retire. She committed herself to a particular duty 70 years ago when she was 26. And she stuck with it and fulfilled that duty all the way to the end. For her country came before everything else. Now she loved a man, she married the man she loved maybe, but did she stay married to him because she loved him? Not clear. And when she married she was very young and very idealistic. So you know, I stopped watching the series The Crown because I found it boring. I found it uninteresting. I stopped, once Churchill was not part of it, I stopped watching because he was interesting and a colorful character and she was not. And the whole point was that she was not. I mean, the interest was mainly, you know, what do you call it? It was interest in, you know, husband's affairs potentially and interest in, you know, certain political issues, but she had no power. So it wasn't really any kind of significance, any kind of significance beyond that. Somebody asked what duty? Well the duty to do the things that are expected from a monarch for the sake of England, whatever that happened to be, it meant putting the interests of England, whatever that happens to be, at the forefront or of the empire, the British empire before that, at the forefront guided by the traditions and the expectations and the playbook, that had been established for a monarch. And the one thing clearly to put aside was your own interest, your own belief, your own interest in beliefs, your own values, your personal values. A British monarch, contrary to the way a British monarch would have been a few hundred years ago, doesn't have a strategy, doesn't have an agenda, doesn't have great goals to achieve other than the preservation of the status quo and allowing and the preservation but most in symbolic terms, not in action, but the preservation in symbolic terms of the system, whatever it happens to be in this case, the constitutional kind of monarchy of England. That's it. So in the series at least, and I think from some of what we know about her pursuit of personal happiness was not a priority and indeed was not something that was pursued or achieved. It was all about serving the crown, whatever the hell that is. And this is why I don't like monarchies, because what is it? What value does it present? They're not elected, maybe that's a good thing, but they're not chosen by any kind of parameter of ability. What is their function? Well, in a modern monarchy like England, there is none, there is no function. So they're symbolic, they're tourist attractions, they represent the continuity of the British system going back to, I don't know when, King Arthur or whatever, but if you really study that British history, well, I mean, parts of it are worth continuing and parts of it are worth chunking and trashing in the history and most of the stuff that's worth trashing has to do with kings. I mean, in this sense, Queen Elizabeth is a positive. She didn't do anything bad. She didn't kill her nephews in the Tower of England. She didn't engage in wars. She didn't make any real important decisions because important decisions are out of her hands and in that sense, again, the whole position is futile and mute. What's the point? She has no significant anything to do that is of significance. So I'm not a fan of the monarchy. I'm not a fan of the British monarchy. I'm not a fan of the queen. The queen strikes me. Queen Elizabeth strikes me as a kind of a sad figure. And it's a shame because I'm a big fan of the United Kingdom. I'm a big fan of Great Britain and I think it should scrap the monarchy. I think the monarchy should go trash heap of history. It's a, the United Kingdom is a modern country with modern values, modern liberties, modern freedoms and we should trash it. The king has no power. The queen has no power. So it's not a big loss. They are one of the richest families in the world. So something would have to be done about that. Now on top of that, one of Queen Elizabeth's great virtues, I think, was that she had, she took no real positions in politics. She took no great positions in terms of the cultural debates. And unfortunately, Charles, as Prince of Wales, has taken positions. He's a real leftist, particularly when it comes to climate change. He is a big advocate of the great reset from the World Economic Forum. So Charles has an agenda. Whether he will allow that agenda to sneak into his reign as king, I don't know. I don't know. But it certainly gives, I don't know, some moral authority in Great Britain to the whole climate change hysteria and to the great reset to have the king of the realm be a advocate for it. So that's, that's kind of bad. So it's nothing against Queen Elizabeth, nothing particularly for Queen Elizabeth. She lived a long life. I wish she had lived a happier life, a more fulfilling life. I suspect that it was a life of a lot of angst and frustration and inhibition and restraints and a life that really lacked passion. But it is a good time to reflect on something. And it's something I'm reflecting a lot on these days have been reflecting and expect to be reflecting on quite a bit as we move into the future, because I think it's an important reflection. The life of Queen Elizabeth, or put it this way, the reign of Queen Elizabeth, the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 70 years, has represents a really important period in human history. And I think her death is an interesting time to reflect on the last 70 years. Not from the perspective of her reign, because the reality is, the fact is, in spite of some Brits complaining about this or rejecting this, the fact is that she had very little, if any, impact on the course the last 70 years have taken. But the last 70 years are super interesting, and her reign does, is in some way representative of those. So I thought that her death is a good time to reflect on the last 70 years. On the period from 1952 to 19, sorry, to 2022, the period in which Queen Elizabeth was Queen of England, or Queen of the British Empire. It is a period indeed in which the British Empire kind of disappeared, but that's not the main characteristic of the next 70 years. The overwhelmingly main characteristic of the last 70 years is that they have been probably the most peaceful and most prosperous period, most prosperous and peaceful 70 years in all of human history. It really doesn't come close. The only period similar to the last 70 years is the period following the Napoleonic Wars. So the period of the mid to late 19th century kind of leading up to World War I. And in some respects that period was better, but certainly with respect to global prosperity. Probably from the perspective of global wars, and the perspective of violence broadly in society, the perspective of number of people just dying, but from the perspective of global prosperity, there has never been a period to match the last 70 years. Indeed, even in terms of life expectancy, the last 70 years have seen astounding progress to where we are today. Now it's easy to complain about the last 70 years, and suddenly if you lived in parts of the world like in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, it was horrible, much of it was horrible, but of course that ended. That ended, was it now, 30 years ago. It's about halfway through the 70 year period that ended, and even in those regions we have seen unbelievable prosperity. But even in places like Africa, Asia, certainly Asia, think about Asia in 1952. Asia of the Korean War, Korea, South Korea is poorer than North Korea is today. Back then Taiwan is devastated and poor, China is miserable and poor, I mean poor is an understatement. All of Southeast Asia is completely poor, there's massive populations all have nothing. Africa is Africa, but Europe 1952 is just starting to barely claw itself out of the misery and destruction and devastation of World War II. Western Europe, Western Europe is poor. The United States which had won the wars, the only country in the world, really left intact. South America is as well, but they're about to go through a period of dictators and stagnation. But the United States is intact, the only country in the world really of significance intact, and it is about to experience a massive economic boom that lasts for 70 years. And yes America engages in a war in Korea and a war in Vietnam, but these are minor wars as compared to the World Wars or to the wars in history, and all of those wars for America are far away. The 1970s, the 1952 to today, maybe we shouldn't say today, until 2019 maybe, on error with the United States provides a beacon for the rest of the world, a model for the rest of the world. The rest of the world, the world that is relatively free at least. But I would include post Mao China in this, and I would include post fall of the Berlin Wall for Eastern Europe and Russia in this. America is a model, a model to be emulated, the model of setting up relatively free markets, a model of setting up a civilized society. In the United States there's more than that, whether you like it or not, the United States in a sense provides a security guarantee on a global scale. It provides a nuclear umbrella to Europe, it provides a presence in the Pacific Ocean, and what the security guarantee really provides for is more than anything else, trade. So what you see during the 70 year era is, or has come right now to be viewed negatively, one of the greatest phenomena in all of human history, one of the greatest periods in all of human history, you get to see globalization. You get to see division of labor on a scale never imagined, not even by Adam Smith. You get to see the integration of the world economy, pretty much every continent, exception of Antarctica, billions of people, and what you get is an unbelievable growth in material well-being, more so in developing countries, but even in developed countries, from 1952 until 2022, we have seen an unbelievable growth in material well-being, and now, granted, growth was great in the 19th century on a relative basis, GDP growth per capita was much greater in the West, technological growth I think was more substantial in the late 19th century, but what you get here is a global phenomenon. You don't just get growth in the West, you don't just get an increase in standard living quality of life and length of life, not just in the West, but you get it, again, for the first time in human history on a global scale. A little bit of that was done by the British Empire in the 19th century, but as the British Empire fades into history during these 70 years and really disappears, what rises to replace it is not an empire, what rises to replace it is a model, an American model, both in terms of a basic political slash economic system and a security guarantee to preserve trade between nations and an emphasis politically and intellectually on free trade. And look, again, the last 70 years have been, there are 70 years that have brought more prosperity to the world than any 70 years in all of human history. And overall in terms of freedom, more people are being liberated from authoritarianism over the last 70 years than any other period in human history, or at least the level of freedom in the world has increased significantly over the last 70 years. Now, again, this might be changing and this is why this is a good point to reflect backwards. The only other comparable area is the 19th century again, post-Napoleon when many people gained their freedoms, but not on the scale of the last 70 years. Now, it's true that while all this is going, our intellectuals rot and the philosophers provide horrible ideas and our culture descends into muck represented by, I don't know, Andy Warhol and rap music, music in quotes, and the Kadrashians and a million other examples you could use to show that culturally and artistically and culturally and the world is in descent during these 70 years. But in an interesting phenomena, what remains of the spirit of the 19th century, what remains of the enlightenment is still manifest some extent politically and certainly economically. And what you get is people striving for more. People are represented by a better life, working hard, insisting on at least some level of economic freedom and growth and growing. And again, in the rest of the world, becoming more and more and more free, which ultimately leads to people becoming more and more and more rich in addition. Now this conflict between a culture that's descending and economies and everything else that's on the rise, economies that are on the rise in a developing world that becomes freer while the developed world, while this model, which is America, is descending, is not sustainable. Because if the model is descending, the rest of the world at some point is going to look at America and has already looked at Americans said, wait a minute. We don't want to be that. We don't want to have the problems that American modern society has. So we're ejecting the model. And in my view, this explains the last decades retreat from liberty in places like China and other places in Eastern Europe and in places like other parts of Asia, where they look at Americans say, uh-uh. And unfortunately, they thought the baby with the bathwater. They thought the good with the bad. They reject a freedom and capitalism and political system with the fact that our culture sucks and our philosophy and ideas that are coming out of us suck. And then that we have these awful economic crises. They don't identify the cause. They blame it on freedom and capitalism. And they turn their backs to freedom and capitalism. That's happening all over the world. And we're seeing the next 70 years, don't look as good as the previous 70 years. The reign of Elizabeth II might come down as, from a material perspective, the best we've ever and ever will, not ever will, but at least in the foreseeable future will have ever. So it's a time to reflect on a success as America, the country that caused the success. The world is an amazing place to live right now. The world is richer and freer than it ever has been in human history because of the United States of America, because of its willingness to protect the trade routes, because of its openness to trade, because of its willingness to export its ideas, because of its insistence on, God forbid, American exceptionalism. That's what made the world a better place. And again, we come down to why I hate Trump so much. This is why I hate Trump so much. Because that America is dead. Now, you can't completely blame Trump for it, but Trump is the one who put the nails in the coffin. I don't know if the final nails, but it certainly feels that way. America along the scent and a lot of people questioning and undermining America's commitment to trade and preserving the trade routes, Trump killed it. He killed it. Yeah, you nominated him to make sure America died. That's why you nominated him. And that's why, that's how he governed. And he has achieved, he's achieved it by killing the one alternative to the left that existed, the Republican Party. By killing the Republican Party, America, the America that brought the world, the greatest prosperity ever, the America that brought the world, the greatest freedom ever, is no longer, it's no longer an advocate of freedom. National conservatism is not freedom. It's no longer an advocate of trade. National conservatism is not trade. The left is anti-trade. The right is anti-trade. Both the anti-freedom, they're no longer willing to protect the trade routes of the world. They want to retrieve a weak America, an uncommitted America, to freedom, to trade, to the ideas of getting rich, the ideas that make possible getting rich. Now again, it's inevitable that America would take this path, given its intellectuals, given the left's complete obliteration of values in this country and the fact that the right has nothing to offer an alternative, nothing to offer an alternative. It is not an accident that 2022 will go down as a year where we see that, I think the material manifestation of this turn away from trade and liberty and freedom and an American model, and we see it in the war in Ukraine. That was the other good news I was going to tell you about the war in Ukraine. I'll tell you about that tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll do a show, we'll talk about Ukraine as part of the show tomorrow. But there's good news out of Ukraine, if like me you're on the Ukraine side. China's behavior, China's collapse into greater and greater authoritarianism. All of this, all of this represents the end of an era. Now arguably that era ended with 9-11 or the great financial crisis or COVID, any one of those is certainly represents in a sense the beginning of the end. But I think it is the end now, it is the end now. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. 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