King Charles’s private fortune estimated at £1.8B
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_the_United_Kingdo...
"Official statistics for the final quarter of 2019 have yet to been published, although in 2018 a total of 37.9 million people visited the UK from overseas and cumulatively spent £22.8 billion"
What percentage of that spending are the royal family actually responsible for? It's hard to disambiguate, but it's surely only a portion of it.
How much less spending would there be if there was no more royal family? Again, hard to estimate. But several European countries have more tourism without royal families. So possibly less than one would expect.
I doubt the royals drive that much tourism. Tourists still flock to Paris and Istanbul despite no royals living there and also to Amsterdam where the royals don't have a powerful brand image.
My point is you don't need living or active royals for tourism.
Turkey has sunny locations.
England is rainy. Music, literature and the royals are its reason for visiting
Palace of Versailles, 10m visitors.
But it's not nearly as lavish as Versailles is, and its place in history is much less important. It wasn't completed until after the monarchy had become subordinate to the Parliament. Its residents have always been figureheads.
Versailles, by contrast, is the ultimate in conspicuous consumption. The building is insanely gaudy, inside and out. The grounds are jaw-dropping. It can take you a day just to walk them. Compared to it, Buckingham Palace is a cottage.
It's also redolent in French history. It was the court at the absolute height of French monarchical power, and played crucial roles in the fall of that power. Marie Antoinette's Petit Trianon, where she dressed up as a peasant girl and played at being a milkmaid, is a potent symbol of how out of touch the monarchy had become.
People would surely come to see Buckingham Palace, home to Queens Victoria and Elizabeth, and be informed about some of the important events that happened there. More would come if it were more open. But it would never be the draw that Versailles is, and people would not come out raving about what extravagant lives its residents led.
I never visited England for the royals. I went to see London, York, Cambridge. Couldn't care less if any royals are currently there or not because I can't see them anyway.
We also have 1000 years of history, museums full of stuff we pillaged, the best pubs in the world, and Greggs.
Quite why anyone would want to visit any other country is a mystery.
Oh, and we're the best at sarcasm.
Upper/cermonial classes exlst all over the world.
Conspicious consumption and conspicuous leisure serve a purpose - you want to be like me then do what I say. Its a method of control.
About the same as J.K. Rowling. Each are storytellers of a fashion I guess.
Either that or the conflicts would have been the cause of nuclear armageddon...
> King Charles has no shortage of palaces, castles and residences to enjoy, but most of them are not technically his. Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace are, for example, owned by the sovereign in right of the crown
You are no better than a common thief if you take what does not belong to you regardless of who the owner is or who you are. And that includes any government. People get to own stuff. If someone's riches cannot be proven as unlawfully obtained by the laws of the time when they were obtained, then taking that money against their will is pure and simple theft.
The silliness behind these types of thinking is that they make it sound like there is a shortage of money. Money can be printed if that's all you want. If riches are being obtained wrongly the pass laws to fix that, don't tell me how nice it would be to steal from the rich, If I wanted to steal assume I would steal from you first. It insults me how people assume others will join on their merry band if robbin-hood-esque thieves.
No, it's not.
The Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch 'in right of The Crown', that is, it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne. But it is not the private property of the monarch - it cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it belong to the monarch.
The important bit is "it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign". If the UK decides to become a republic the reign of the king will end, and with that the royal family's estates revert to ownership by the people.
Umm...no. Why would you assume that. It is not the people's land. If the monarchy is dissolved then what happens to that land is a matter of negotiation and possible court battles. The monarchy allowed the people to self-govern in exchange for being allowed to continue to be monarchs. One common theme I have seen in this thread is that people think they live under "rule of the people" but we live under "rule of law" a contract cannot be made void simply by passing a law to void it, because then the contract had no real meaning to begin with if one side can just get up and say they don't want to fulfill their obligations.
Only if the monarchy abdicates their roles can the agreement over their estate be cleanly voided.
Even if you allow them their private holdings, the monarchy still have special carve outs in laws, still get to interfere in the democratic process (King's Consent and other methods), and are still subsidised by today's democratic government. The private wealth is relevant to all those things.
Every country in the last thousand or three years has had rules by which the military, people and ruling class elite all at least outwardly agreed upon as the basis if their governmental system. Anyone that rose to power through that system or was able to by any means change the rules is legitimate.
"Only the type of rulers I like in other countries and in different times in the past are legitimate" is a silly notion.
"Some guys in fancy hats convinced some other guys in fancy hats that it was okay, so now all people for the rest of time are bound by that" is a much, much sillier notion.
If simply making a law is all that is required for legitimacy, then simply passing a law that says the monarch's property is forfeit is all that is required for it to be legitimate.
Look at Taiwan for example? Almost every country does not acknowledge them as a country separate from China yet they are because their people and military accept their authority over their island and they have control over the island.
Look at north korea, the Kim family's rule is very much legitimate even though we can't say most of the people enjoy their rule, however they tolerate it and the military accepts them as rightful rulers. You can't justifiably prosecute them under NK law for stealing from their starving people for example because everything they do is by their legitimate and basically absolute authority.
If a ruler is not legitimate it is either the military or the people that have to engage in active revolt at a meaningful scale to bring about doubt regarding the ruler's legitimacy.
In the US civil war for example, it is hard to say Abraham Lincoln was the legitimate ruler of the south. At least not until he won the war.
Rules that can't be enforced have no meaning. Rules are enforced by force which ultimately means military but at the same time rules also have no meaning if a very largr portion if the people being ruled reject the rules. Therefore under the rule of law, legitimacy of a ruler is established simply by their ability to make and enforce rules. Not their popularity or niceness.
Anyone who followed the law cannot be punished and anyone who broke the law is subject to punishment. You can change laws and punish people who break them but the rule of law loses all meaning if anyone can be punished for an action that was lawful at the time.
If laws are based solely on force, then that's the end of it and whoever has the most force at a given time makes the laws.
You can't just say "that person happened to have the most force at that exact moment, so whatever they did is fine and they can't be touched even by someone who now has more force".
By your logic, the Nazis should not have punished for the Holocaust because they made some laws that allowed them to do it first. They murdered 10+ million people, but executing a couple dozen people who orchestrated it is beyond the pale because they passed some laws to say it was okay first.
Today the king has only the right to be told, and the right to be heard. Parliament does the rest (i.e. laws and rules).
Further, it's fair to say that legitimacy has a lot of interpretations. If it's 'they are legitimate because they have power' then the definition is circular.
If you invade a country and steal it's riches then it is that country's burden to exact justice against you by means of war or diplomacy. That is not the topic here.
Much if britain got rich off of slavery and conquest yet it is the royal's riches that is being discussed here and the reason is not because it was unlawfully gained. It was abdolutley lawfully gained under the laws of that time.
How you obtained wealth irrelevant so long as it was lawful. You can argue that invading countries was illegal at the time and the royal's broke the law and if that is correct I am with you on that. If is not then you are an even worse if a theif than they ever were because you are not only masquerading as an agent of justice when you are stealing just like they did but you are acting in hypocrisy as if you were better than them.
And even if you were how silly if you to take wealth gained by conquest and give it to your people when it should go to all the countries from which it was stolen.
I mean .. yes? Odd to see an argument that taxation is bad but reducing inherited wealth through inflation is completely fine.
Although ultimately what people care about is real, material conditions. People would not be quite so hungry for the wealth of the monarch if they could afford food, a lesson from the French Revolution.
It doesn't matter what people want or care about or if they are literally starving. That does not justify theft. I am not against taxation, I am all for raising taxes and making the rich pay their fair share. What I abhorr and what revolts me is this idea that you can just take their money because you need it more. It is theirs. Period. End of story. Unless they broke the law to gain it.
If the law was unfair that allowed them to gain wealth? change it. But you can't retroacrively take someone else's property or wealth because now it is considered unfairly gained. At the most fundamental and basic level that would be unfair and unjust. A person can only be punished if they broke the rules at the time of the act.
The french revolution was uncivilized barbaric murderous rampage. If you agree with thay then you have already earned your povery and starvation. In no understanding of justice is stealing justified because someone has too much wealth.
I comment about public execution of child rapists and i get downvoted here but sure monarchs deserved it.
In order to justifyably kill someone they must have taken a direct role in taking someone's life and that act must have been unlawful and their convinction must be after due process and after allowing them to defend themselves and confront their accuser.
Chopping off the heads of rich people because they got rich off of your starvarion like that is not to different than mass shooters and serial killers who kill because they too felt wronged and they too felt the rule of law and the process of justice was beneath them and they too granted themselves authority to be judges and executioners.
-- Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand on the subject of Hacker News
Advocating for anything less makes you the criminal and law breaker. Whatever injustice you face you have deserved it already because you accepted injustice against others.
The law if any ruler can be unjust and if you tolerate that law then those acting in accordance to it are immune from future punishment. If the ruler is unjust then you must rebel if you want to change thier laws.
Blood usually but always is the source that allows establishment of a military which must first accept that form of government and then the people need only tolerate the rule of law enforced ultimately through the military.
Any source of law that is capable of enforcing that law is legitimate.
But you can disagree with authoritatians for example and fight to replace them with a democracy (Iraq is calling, they want Saddam back! Lol jk) but even though you can do so it is unjust and under rule of law criminal to punish someone who followed the law of the land or to creatr laws that punish people for acts done before the law was passed.
Regardless, by that philosophy, they would be perfectly justified to take the king's property. If they are capable of doing it, then it's legitimate.
Personal possessions, tools to work, a place to live, a pension - yes certainly.
However as you get beyond that, the 'natural justice' breaks down and it becomes more about the system a society uses to decide how its resources are allocated. Under the capitalist system, wealth concentrations are allowed - though this is not a defining feature of the system (with the concept of shareholding, ownership can be split up into many small pieces). However wealth agglomerates very readily in this system, and I'd argue that nowadays wealth concentrations are becoming a serious problem.
Under the social ownership model, society (through the state) uses a top down command and control system for allocating resources. We (even the US!) live in a mixed system, where capital or social ownership is used as has found to be most appropriate for each sector. It's roughly 50:50.
Notions like 'theft' become meaningless once you are into societal level resource allocation.
And it is not about resource allocation. If you have wealth the someone generated or traded that wealth for/to you. You exchanged that wealth fairly for something. Taking that from you against your will and outside of explicit taxation authority of the government by the government is theft.
You can tax rich people all you want you just can't take their money because you can. Society did not take the risk or make the investment they made and cannot be allowed to consider their wealth its property.
> the 'natural justice' breaks down and it becomes more about the system a society uses to decide how its resources are allocated.
In a free and just society, society has no say in this matter once weath has been obtained and taxed lawfully.
The government is free to own companies and make investments to compete with rich people if it wants to do so.
Only a society of criminals and thieves takes from others because ir can. And that is exactly what any country that has tried to take money from people just because it can ended up becoming. Corrupt and completely unjust.
Only if the society or government decides to enforce a particular notion of property rights.
> If you have wealth the someone generated or traded that wealth for/to you. You exchanged that wealth fairly for something.
"Hemedti owns, along with other family members, a gold mining company that operates in lands he seized in Darfur 2017. In 2018, Bashir gave Hemedti permission to mine and sell gold, and operations extended to other gold rich areas in outside Darfur in the south of the country. The gold was exported, according to a 2019 Reuters investigation, circumventing capital controls, and even sold to the Sudanese central bank for a preferential rate. The yield was allegedly used to enrich Hemedti and his family,"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/20/sudan-outsider...
Most fortunes are made by theft, deceit, luck, and bloodshed, not by hard work.
> once weath has been obtained and taxed lawfully.
So let's tax all assets above 2MM at 100%.
Revolutions against monarchies have disproven this repeatedly.
You can just take the wealth of monarchs and their associated hereditary elites “because you can”.
Arguably, getting to a negotiated surrender tends to produce better long-term results, but that’s not a “can’t”, in fact, the alternative is a necessary foundation for a negotiated outcome.
There was no free exchange. There was conquest and centuries of theft by thugs in fancy hats.
They have no right to their ancestors' ill-gotten gains simply because those ancestors created laws that allowed it.
Non-democratic laws are fundamentally illegitimate.
(What proportion of the King's wealth derives from the time before Magna Carta and the concept of legal restraint on the Crown? Until then it was effectively impossible for anything the monarch did, including the most blatant theft and murder, to be deemed illegal)
In re "stealing other peoples rightful inheritance", as a side comment, the Crown (but not the King) is the beneficiary of inheritances for which an owner cannot be found.
So, theft under color of law.