Free DemocracyThe God That Failed by Hans-Hermann Hoppe

rights were not held on the precarious tenure of grant but were freehold possessions. The sovereign's right also was a freehold. It was a subjective right as much as the other rights, though of a more elevated dignity, but it could not take the other rights away. (pp. 172-73) de Jouvenel later goes on to say:
    The much-cited anecdote of Frederick the Great and the miller of Sans-Souci faithfully represents the ancient state of affairs. The king's rights have incomparably greater scope than those of the miller; but as far as the miller's right goes it is as good as the king's; on his own ground, the miller is entitled to hold off the king. Indeed there was a deep-seated feeling that all positive rights stood or fell together; if the king disregarded the miller's title to his land, so might the king's title to his throne be disregarded. The profound if obscure concept of legitimacy established the solidarity of all rights, (p. 189) And on the funding of kings, de Jouvenel notes that:
    State expenditures, as we now call them, were thought of in feudal times as the king's own expenditures, which he incurred by virtue of his station. When he came into his station, he simultaneously came into an "estate" (in the modern sense of the word); i.e., he found himself endowed with property rights ensuring an income adequate to "the king's needs." It is somewhat as if a government of our own times were expected to cover its ordinary expenditures from the proceeds of state-owned industries, (p. 178)
    However, it remains worth emphasizing that any monopolization of law and order still implies higher prices and/or lower product quality than those prevailing under competitive conditions, and that even a king will still employ his monopoly of punishment to his own advantage: by shifting increasingly from the principle of restituting and compensating the victim of a rights violation to that of compensating himself, the king. See on this Bruce L. Benson, "The Development of Criminal Law and Its Enforcement," Journal des Economistes et des Etudes Humaines 3 (1992).
    Owing to these restrictions regarding entrance into government and the exclusive status of the individual ruler and his family (as king and nobles), private-government ownership (monarchism) stimulates the development of a clear "class consciousness" on the part of the governed public and promotes opposition and resistance to any expansion of the government's power to tax. A clear-cut distinction between the few rulers and the many ruled exists, and there is little or no risk or chance of a person's moving from one class to the other. Confronted with an almost insurmountable barrier to "upward" mobility, solidarity among the ruled—their mutual identification as actual or potential victims of government violations of property rights—is strengthened, and the ruling class's risk of losing its legitimacy as a result of increased taxation is accordingly heightened. 22
    22 Bertrand de Jouvenel writes: "A man of our time cannot conceive the lack of real power which characterized the medieval king, from which it naturally followed that in order to secure the execution of a decision he needed to involve other leaders whose say-so reinforced his own." Bertrand de Jouvenel, "On the Evolution of Forms of Government" in idem, The Nature of Politics, p. 113. Elsewhere, de Jouvenel noted:

    In fact, the class consciousness among the ruled exerts a moderating effect not only on the government's internal policies, but also on its conduct of external affairs. Every government must be expected to pursue an expansionist foreign policy. The larger the territory and the greater the population over which a monopoly of confiscation extends, the better off those in charge of this monopoly will be. Because only one monopoly of expropriation can exist in any given territory, this expansionary tendency must be expected to go hand in hand with a tendency toward centralization (with ultimately only one,