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Comment by redwall_hp | Hacker News Reader

It's the other way around: they're wealthy holders of land, like the rest of the dukes and such, who control large chunks of the land in the UK and own large businesses. The UK benefits from the royal family allowing the use of their land, including historic buildings, at a relatively low cost.

Another example: the Duke of Westminster is worth $12B and owns a large chunk of London outright, including a ton of large, notable buildings. (Also, I think, the Twinings tea company.)

There's the Crown Estate, which is controlled by the crown, but the family also owns the Duchy of Cornwall (45K acres) and the Duchy of Lancaster (45K acres), as well as numerous private holdings that are less visible. And this is predominantly highly developed city space.

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> The UK benefits from the royal family allowing the use of their land, including historic buildings, at a relatively low cost.

How does the UK benefit from the royal family allowing this, rather than just having a non-monarchist government that does the same thing?

Does doing away with the monarchy also mean confiscating their property?

If not then it's still the same question: how does the UK benefit from having the royal family allowing this rather than just some other entity that owns the land and rents it out at low cost? Why does that entity need to be a monarchy?

Mostly: tourism. The royal family is widely thought to bring in a lot more than it costs.

Also, they provide a lot of face-time for the government. They show up at a lot of events, the kind of thing for which you might hire a celebrity to give it a sense of occasion. The actual dollar value of that is hard to estimate, and it's less valuable than the tourism, but the fact that people still want it suggests that it's providing something of value.

Yes obviously, along with their heads.

Because it would have been sold off by a previous government. (see virtually every other money making asset.)

But this seems like the fallacy of comparing a benevolent and somewhat reasonable monarchy to a malicious or foolish non-monarchist government. Any system can wind up with stupid people doing stupid things. The difference is if you get one stupid person in as king they could sell everything off or cause who knows what damage, whereas with a more diffuse government one person can't do as much harm. (The current situation in the US also shows how it's important to keep the power diffused rather than centralized in one person.)

> if you get one stupid person in as king they could sell everything off

Thats the point, its not trivial to sell it off, because it was set up to counteract a fooling king in exchange for a stipend.

This system was explicitly designed to take an asset from the crown and place it in trust so that the king could get a steady income, ostensibly from assets that had unpredictable income.

Thus the crown estate was born, which has a bunch of rules, most notably about taking on debt.

see any national park?

How much of the UKs national parks are publicly owned?

(dartmoor is owned partly by the crown)

If I violently conquer and area kill everyone who objects will you also defend my "property rights" ? It's all my land after all. Lol

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