>>520990570
decisions will be made from on high with by leaders who have no obligation, nor any inclination, to make appeals to the masses to try to win public support. Fact is, those leaders need no public approval to act or make laws or execute policies. What the public thinks about anything is a nonissue and an irrelevance. And in that quietude of the masses, who are not being led around by the nose by demagogues or petty men of ambition, i.e. "politicians" or professional panderers to public opinion (who then, upon election, cease to concern themselves with mass opinion until the next election is approaching), but who instead of forming into enthused and wild-eyed mobs just go about their daily business as common people living their lives, there is a freedom -- a freedom from politics itself, with all its crazed stirring up of popular passions and leading one part of the social body against another -- that we who live in republics or democracies or constitutional monarchies -- whatever you wish to call them, these systems based on voting that purport to represent the will of the people as the basis of their powers and legitimacy -- simply do not know because we have not experienced it and the last people who lived in the old absolute monarchies have long since died and whatever memories they passed on in their family lines have by now faded to the point of disappearing.
Living in a political system, i.e. a system run by politicians who make a living on politicking -- appealing to the masses, which means rankling the masses more and more until they become proper mobs with the insane mob mentality -- instead of in one the absolute monarchies that have been the world-historical norm, is just to trade one kind of freedom for another in what is either a zero-sum game or else even a losing game where the political life, or life under a representative government of politicians, turns out to be a comedown from the more natural lifeway found in a realm headed by a king.

In the feudal system, the monarch owned all land. Even a grand duke's fief was merely granted to him by the monarch, and the monarch could take it away, in theory, at any time, though a fight might start (which the monarch usually won when it came to this, since the king is preeminent). In imperial China, the emperor could dispose of any land he wished, as in Pharaonic Egypt and any other system of government that has ever existed.
People complain that land can only be bought in China for less than a century, and complain that in America, property owners still have to pay property taxes.
But a state is a sovereign and claims all the territory in its domain, which means that, necessarily, for a state to be a state, it must have ultimate ownership of all land. This is why every state will be retain the right to take back any land that it ends up needing. National security and national integrity trump all other concerns, for anarchy is the worst fate of all.

So don't question why the state makes you pay property taxes, or why in China and Ethiopia, the state only sells land for limited times. Don't worry about this matter. Just realize that it is the nature of the state to be the master of its own terrain, and the master is always the one who is ultimately in charge.

"Politics" is the form of governance in an ancient Greek polis or city-state, with an elected, representative government (a democracy/republic). Please note, ancient Greek democracy required sitting government officials to administer the state, i.e. bureaucrats, and had elections for who would represent the people. There isn't much difference at all between what we call a "democracy" and what we call a "republic." Both are representative forms of government where citizens elect who represents them. And politics only exists in representative governments.
In a monarchy, there is no politics: no battle within the convoluted will of the population. There is courtly intrigue, as ministers to the monarch push their own agendas and try to gain the sovereign's favor, but it is a stretch to call this "politics," because no representation of the people exists in this system; rather, the king (or queen regnant) is God or Heaven's representative on earth for that specific nation. In Medieval Europe, the monarch was God's representative, who spoke for God and acted in God's name. In Imperial China, the emperor was mandated by Heaven. In every monarchy, the sovereign is legitimized by the divine, or rather, by the religious establishment and the traditional religious beliefs of the culture.

Politics is bad. It always results in violence and civil wars, and then, to top it all off, every representative government, which is to say every political government or democracy/republic, ends up back in monarchy, which is the default state of complex human societies. Only four representative governments, i.e. democracies/republics, existed before 1776: Ancient Greece (particularly Athens), the Roman Republic, the Florentine Republic, and the Dutch Republic. All ended up back in monarchy.
The people need no say. They don't know how to govern, and they themselves are governed by their passions. Real freedom is not the right to do what you want, but is the right to do what is right.