It seems as though every time one of the high schoolish beltway “libertarians” decides to throw an envious hissy fit at the Mises Institute or LewRockwell.com I receive emails from various strangers asking if I advocate monarchy “like your friend Hans-Hermann Hoppe,” author of Democracy: The God That Failed. All that this shows is that the high schoolish blogger is either not very good at reading the English language, or he is a liar.
Democracy: The God That Failed takes the same scholarly approach to the subject of monarchy as a book written by my old professor and one-time colleague, Gordon Tullock, who once wrote a similar book on Autocracy. Namely, it is an application of economic analysis to the study of the comparative operation of democracy and monarchy, period. In light of the disaster that Woodrow Wilson’s “war to make the world safe for democracy” created in Europe, Hoppe states on page xiv that “Certainly, then, it would be worthwhile to take a systematic look at the historic transformation from monarchy to democracy” in Europe.
Hoppe clearly states on page xx of his introduction that: “I am not a monarchist and the following is not a defense of monarchy.” This could not possibly be stated more clearly, which leads me to believe that the juvenile-minded blogger in question is simply lying through his teeth.
