flamingjimmy said:
RYjet911 said:
They bring tourist money. Simple as. Way more than they're spending.
This argument simply does not wash. They do not bring in tourist money. Their houses bring in tourist money.
If they didn't live in them anymore, then we could open up all of their estates in their entirety to the public and make even more money from tourism.
Imagine if you could go and walk through pretty much any room of Buckingham Palace any time you wanted, if it was opened up as a museum. It would surely still rake in the money, probably more than it does now.
More importantly I don't think we should have a monarchy because the very concept itself is disgusting, this is supposed to be the 21st century and we still have kings and queens, come on! How can we ever hope to have true equality whilst there is still a nobility?
Yes, houses that are maintained and run by organisations set up and managed by the Monarchy themselves, and at the moment at least neither the government nor other private charities would be able to take up the slack if the Monarchy were gone. This means the buildings would fall into disrepair and make no money at all.
Also, for a lot of the tourists the best thing about The Monarchy is not just it's history, but the fact that the history is still happening in some shape or form. Lot's of countries
used to have a Monarchy, but ours is special to them because we're one of the very few countries left where the Monarchy can still be seen. So from that angle the people themselves are just as important as the buildings they inhabit.
As for your last point, before you decide to start chanting death to the aristo's, it might be worth thinking about the small fact that charities set up by members of the Royal Family and other wealthy individuals do more to help the underprivileged members of our society than the Labour Party has ever done.
Besides, no nation is ever going to have 'true equality', nobility or not (capitalism does more damage to the concept of equality than the aristocracy anyway). Sorry to disappoint you, but it's human nature at it's most basic. People need a structured hierarchy to function efficiently, just like all other species of ape, and the whole concept of a hierarchy requires that some individuals be of higher status than others. As well as that, not everybody in the world is a hardcore philanthropist and that will never change, because most people will always put themselves, their family, and their close friends first. After that other people are secondary considerations at best. It's just the way our minds are programmed to function and thanks to those two little nuggets of human behavior true equality can never be achieved. The sooner people realise that the safer everyone will be because every attempt in human history to change that has only led to suffering (see: USSR, China, Cuba, North Korea etc. etc.)
