Of barons and kings.

Liberalism is the antithesis of absolutism. To the arbitrary power of the despot, it opposes the total freedom of each individual. Instead of rigid hereditary structures, it proposes the social mobility of meritocracy. But, where the anarchists consider that the past must be obliterated, along with state and property, liberals loudly encourage property, conveniently rewrite the past and focus their resentment on the state. By rejecting all forms of government control, liberalism brandishes the banner of liberty. And, in doing so, it creates the illusion that central government is the only form of oppression, and that property and state are not intimately linked.

The Magna Charta of 1215 imposed limits to the monarch's absolutism. Notably article 39: No freeman shall be arrested, or imprisoned, or dispossessed of his tenement, or outlawed, or exiled, or in anywise proceeded against, unless by the legal judgment of his Peers, or by the law of the land. But the Norman barons, who led the uprising that was resolved at Runnymede, did not contest the privileges and property they had acquired by right of royal conquest. And so it goes, down through the ages, with robber barons either vilifying central government as a limit to their own power, or using central government to grab vast expanses of land, to obtain tax exemptions, to have infrastructures built for them, and to be bailed out massively with the nation's hard-earned future incomes.

The alternatives seem to be a weak king faced with strong barons, and a strong king faced with weak barons, and the nation chooses one then the other. This back and forth movement could seem to be the best of both worlds, or the less bad, except that it perpetuates itself and excludes all other possibilities. The nation, the people, may choose between supporting the barons against the king, or the king against the barons. And the contest is so ancient and so repetitively mesmerising that the actual usefulness of barons and kings is never seriously discussed. Does a nation need to be led by a potentially dangerous megalomaniac, who claims he has a vision of future greatness? Should a nation accept that the wealth it produces be the property of so very few? Is the plutocratic monarchy humanity’s manifest destiny?