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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that in this day and age there are still 'better' people, it's not like we don't know that this is a fiction.

In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched. There is a whole media circus around them and there are still special laws on the books giving the royal people rights that ordinary people do not have.

The most heard argument against abolishing these institutions is that 'you need a head of state' and 'a president costs money too'. I'm not really sure what either has to do with creating and maintaining a special class of people, and I can't imagine a presidency to be as costly and as messy as what we have today.

Besides that, 'our' royal family isn't even Dutch, but hardly anybody seems to care, as long as the fairy tale is allowed to continue it's all good.

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The purpose of monarchy is to rise above democracy, to ensure stability of the country in a time when the political system might not be stable. It's the realisation that democracy isn't perfect.

Consider the election of the new German president, Christian Wulff: It was deeply entrenched in the isolated, day-to-day petty politics and personal rivalry of the government. He probably owes favours left and right. Will he be able to rise above all that if, in the four to ten year he's likely to hold the office, Germany might need the special discretionary powers that the president holds in case of instability? On the other hand, Queen Beatrix has been the heir to the throne since before PM Balkenende was born, and Queen since he was probably still in University, which is for 22 year by the time he assumed office.

Which one of President Wulff and Queen Beatrix is more likely to say no and fire the head of government if Chancellor Merkel, respectively PM Balkenende, decides to take dictatorial powers for her or him self? Or less dramatically, more likely to ensure a peaceful transition if Germany or the Netherlands decides to fall apart, like Belgium seems to be?

And I said "more likely", not "sure to". No nation is failsafe, not a monarchy, not a democracy.

It wouldn't be up to Wulff or Beatrix to do something about that, but up to the judicial arm. Beatrix technically has a lot of power but in practice if a prime minister were to ignore her it would most likely fall to the judicial arm to remove such a person from power in a more permanent fashion.

That said, Balkenende is about as weak a person as I can see to make such a power play and I doubt he'd get very far with his supporters doing this. Wilders however...

The judicial arm can only act within the law. The law can be changed. Hitler assumed the chancellory legally. Perhaps a German king could have overruled the annexation of Austria and/or the Sudetenland? (of course, it's pure speculation, and the Kaiser of WW1 wasn't exactly a bulwark against aggression).

Yes, there are characters significantly more scary than Balkenende, and I think the Queen is a much better cooling agent for such a person than the judicial arm can be.

It can also work the other way around though. A dictator could keep some royalty around in order to grant legitimacy to his regime. Spain is an interesting case in point. They had both, a king as a stooge of Franco and then another king saving the young democracy.

I think the idea of some people being more equal than others is terrible. This idea has kept the world in a state of constant exploitation and imperialist war for thousands of years. I don't want to see it continue in any shape or form, even if it may have benefits in some situations.

The Saudi example is a particularly nasty one by the way, but I don't think you intended to defend an absolute monarchy.

It's not a silver bullet, and obviously monarchy doesn't make society impervious to totalitarianism, as Francos Spain and the Saudis are examples of.

I don't give much for the egalitarian argument. Yes, I'm better than a lot of other people, and I have no problem accepting that there are other people who are better than me. Now, this doesn't imply that I should be in a ruling position over them, nor them over me.

The royal family isn't in power because they're "better", or because they just happen to be part of a class that happens to be in power. They're in power because they're the royal family, and the throne is passed down through predefined rules that they don't control. If you're not heir to the throne, you won't get it (this is why they're not a "class").

They exist as a check of democracy where the process of getting elected has more in common with a reality-TV-show than a thorough assessment of skills and ideas. Members of the royal family are born with a single, simple mission, should they choose to accept it: to secure the longevity of their nation. If they don't accept, there exists the option of abdication, which is irreversible. They train for this single mission for decades. At no point in their lives are they subject to petty political quibbles, and this is how they keep their legitimacy.

You have a very odd view of history. Thrones have not been passed down based on any predefined rules. Who could have predefined them anyway?. Thrones were faught over in wars, endless scheming, forced and tactical marriage, etc. Europe was devastated again and again for no better reason than some wacko royal trying to expand his power or go to heaven by slaughtering other peoples.

And no, they do not exist to keep democracy in check. They existed long before democracy and had to be removed from absolute power by force in most cases and by threatening force in others. If anything, democracy was introduced to keep the royals in check.

These clans together with their clerical stooges and armed thugs have wasted the world's resources for their own eccentric, self serving and unproductive endeavors for thousands of years.

And those constitutional monarchs, which are admittedly rather harmless, are not a counter weight to failures of TV-show democracy either. Quite the contrary. They are themselves the material for endless media gossip. Managing their own reputation is what they do all their lives. Keeping the monarchy going, that's all they do and that's all they have ever done.

Ah, yes, and sometimes they write strange letters to ministers about organic farming, alternative medicine or their private history Disney style architectural preferences.

Well yes and no. They have special rights (you often can't criminally prosecute them, for example) and special duties (the Danish royals must be Christians, cannot vote or say anything in political debates, etc) but on the other hand, we got our democracy without war or a revolution, so a lot of lives where saved by keeping the royals.

But yeah, getting rid of them might be useful.

(All of this is from a Danish perspective).

Countries that don't have royalty make their own royalty. I'd rather keep the real thing.

> In the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, England and a whole pile of other countries the royal families are pretty well entrenched.

But in most of those places royalty is at best the nominal chief executive, with few if any factual power.

Technically however they have ALL the power.

No they don't - the last king of England to claim anything like absolute power had his head cut off after a civil war.

Certainly all European monarchies are constitutional:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_monarchy

I said technically. That is legally. The last monarch to not sign a bill was around 1700, but the queen has the legal right to not sign a bill. Also, the prime minister has the power, but he derives it from the royal prerogative, that is the queen, who can disolve parliament, appoint prime ministers, ministers, dismiss them.

So too, the entire united Kingdom is owned by the Queen, by a right of conquest from William the conqueror in 1066.

The queen can declare war, the judiciary derives power from the Crown, etcetera etcetera. Of course in practice things are much more sensible, but legally, all power rests with the monarch. She can not create new powers, but the powers she does have can be given or taken away.

Also, the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. It does have an unwritten constitution, so it is indeed a constitutional monarchy, but that kind of deals with the rule of law, conventions which are not binding, etcetera. There are some legal restrictions, for example the queen can not make law without the assent of Parliament, she can not dismiss judges, it of course is not an absolute monarchy. However, legally all power derives from her, thus, she has all the powers.

You're right that many of the restrictions on the Queen's power are customary rather than official, but there are some official restrictions on her powers as well--- she isn't an absolute monarch. Since at least the 17th century, the Monarch has been unable to impose taxes without Parliament's consent, cannot make new laws through proclamation (they must be passed by Parliament), cannot imprison people without a judgment by the judiciary, etc.

> The last monarch to not sign a bill was around 1700, but the queen has the legal right to not sign a bill.

When King Baudouin of Belgium refused to sign the abortion bill in 1990 (for religious reasons), the Government declared him 'temporarily unable to reign' for a day, and signed it for him.

Hahaha. Belgium is a strange country from the point of view of governance. In the United Kingdom however I think there would be great constitutional crises if the Queen does not give assent. You can not simply declare her unable to reign for a day as all power is derived from her, thus, all others would have no power to sign either.

It would be an interesting time though, I wonder if it will ever come to pass.

They're not chief executives, not nominally, not actually. They're chairman of the board. The only power they have is firing the executives and approving the next one.

Those powers were stripped along with virtually all others from the Swedish monarchy in the 1974's reform of government, and now sits with the speaker. Our royal family isn't a lot more than a well payed magnets for tabloid journalists, so that our real civil-servants can get work done.

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