For a while now I've considered Price Charles the ultimate homeownerist. Not content with vigorously opposing anyone building anything in London tall enough to peer into one of his many back gardens, or simply objecting to tall buildings in general, he actually heads a homeownerist front organisation with the raison d'être of reverting other people's farms back into worthless medieval swamps.
So this morning over coffee I read the serialisation of Tom Bower's hatchet job in the Mail Online. I don't know if they are true. But if they are, I think these two quote sum up the wasteful, economic madness of homeownerism nicely:
"With a personal income of millions from the Duchy of Cornwall (£16.3 million in 2007 alone) he could afford to indulge his slightest whim — yet even that didn’t satisfy him."
"He was also unusually particular about his gardens at Highgrove. Because he refused to use pesticides, he employed four gardeners who would lie, nose-down, on a trailer pulled by a slow-moving Land Rover to pluck out weeds. In addition, retired Indian servicemen were deployed to prowl through the undergrowth at night with torches and handpick slugs from the leaves of plants."
14 comments:
By becoming a republic and appointing Tony Blair as President-for-life; or Gordon Brown; or John Major... er... Long live the Queen!
Well the Queen's long life is partly responsible for what Charles has become.
He wouldn't have had time to develop these silly ideas had he become King in even his 40s. It's quite sad for him really that he still hasn't been able to start the job he was born to do when people born around the same time as him are all retiring.
There are no serious republics with Presidents-for-life, so I cannot take this point seriously.
Monarchy is the natural state of affairs. North Korea is a hereditary monarchy. The republic of Rome did not last and gave way to Caesars. The democracy of Athens was crushed by the kingdom of Sparta.
As for "serious" republics, I'm not sure we're a serious country any more, when the British Defence Secretary publicly tells Russia to shut up and go away - something must have gone off in his baby food.
Btw given more time, Blair would have ensconsed himself somehow, his ambitions were and still are limitless.
I never understand why, the moment people speak of getting rid of the royals, someone chirps up with "well of course we'd need a president" then goes on about them being a life-long despot.
Why do we need anyone besides the PM, who has full power right now?
B.F. Why indeed? Without a president we'd all go mental and end up a bunch of anarchists. (No bad thing on a libertarian blog.)
I will say one thing for Charly. His Duchy range of cheddars and farmed salmon are top notch.
Sackerson - I too think monarchy is a natural state of affairs, but not an inevitable one. Popular revolution is also perfectly natural. And a game, with rules, fair elections and universal suffrage gives us the best shot at avoiding both hereditary leadership and violent revolt.
Curtis - allegedly the Queen accepts Charles is completely useless and told Diana as much. I'm not so sure we can always blame the parents you know. Maybe he does genuinely have some dodgy wiring.
Piotr - the French don't seem to have an issue do they? Not that I'm suggesting the guillotine is the solution in 2018.
Ben F - me nether, we just amend everything so that 'the King/Queen' becomes 'the Crown' which we can keep in the tower of London like sacred idol. Or sell it to the Arabs or Chinese and amend to 'the People'.
paulc156 - he 'sold' 'exclusive selling rights' to 'Duchy Originals' to Waitrose in 2009. Rumour has it it was basically bankrupt and the 'exclusive selling rights' angle was to save him the embarrassment. I'm afraid that even with all that privilege he couldn't run a successful non-monopoly business.
Land Value Tax will sort them out.
In principle I'm against monarchy, just as I am against presidents for life.
Monarchy is just an extreme form of presidents for life i.e. hereditary presidents for life (there are other options!), but if monarchy were purely a decorative/ceremonial thing for the tourists rather than underpinning the whole Home-Owner-Ist rent-seeking agenda, then I wouldn't mind.
I'm against it anyway. Why should we have a job where I have to tell my kids, after giving them a speech about how "they can be anything they want to be ... except ...".
Also it's worse than racism. These guys don't just want you to be white, they want the same goddamn bloodline! It's the thin end of the wedge that sees the mess we are in today.
He's not on my side. That's all I need to know.
The rot set in when Diana did that interview in 1995. It was all downhill from there as far as I'm concerned.
Its not as if our representative democracy is any better.The present"government" is an embarrassing shower of shit. Sergey Lavrov is right: the Salisbury affaire is their amateurish attempt to create a crisis to distract from the Brexit crisis.What he can't see is that Brexit is a dead cat distraction from the terminal crisis of homeownerism .Ever since Adam Smith in 1776 the upper class trash in this country have realised that they have to capture the land price increases for themselves that clearly belong to the government's LVT receipts. Now, however, residential land is everywhere so expensive that people can't afford to buy and cannot afford to rent while saving for a deposit.We have reached the Henry George maximum. When they admit that the land market is broken they don't consciously realise that the political system that has been made to depend on unearned capital gains from land price inflation diverted into the private sector (sans LVT)is fucked with it. Well some of them do.
Excellent advert for Landrover tho'. First gear, low range = weed pulling pace Mind you the pre-dpf/pre urea injection diesel probably did for more weeds than the weed pickers. But I bet they had a laugh...
"he employed four gardeners who would lie, nose-down, on a trailer pulled by a slow-moving Land Rover to pluck out weeds. In addition, retired Indian servicemen were deployed to prowl through the undergrowth at night with torches and handpick slugs from the leaves of plants."
That might seem like wasteful consumption to some people, but it is at least six people who have a job as a result who might otherwise be unemployed.
I was told by a local here that the lord who owned the Big House (now demolished) used to employ a man to sweep the drive from the big house to the church on Sundays just before the Family drove down it to go to church. It was meant to be an example of aristocratic waste, but in fact it was more likely to be a job for someone otherwise unemployable in the days before the welfare state.
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