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How is this not patently false? If you take someone living below the poverty line, earning minimum wage, renting their meager apartment, eating highly processe
by pharke 11y ago
How is this not patently false? If you take someone living below the poverty line, earning minimum wage, renting their meager apartment, eating highly processed carbs and pseudo-meat, in debt to their bank and payday loan sharks, and under constant threat of homelessness brought on by unexpected illness or economic downturn, how is this situation in any way superior to a king or queen as they existed before "our generation" which I take to mean the modern era rather than literally our generation.
A monarch of the past would have obviously better access to food, more of it, higher quality, they might have slightly less variety available (dependent on the era and location) but they certainly weren't eating the prepackaged garbage that passes for low budget food today.
By law they owned not only their own vast properties, houses, palaces, etc. but also that of all of their subjects and nobility allowing them to give and take as they wished from anyone under their dominion. Even after reforms almost all royal families were still left with vast holdings that produce more than enough wealth to live absurdly opulent lifestyles. There have been many cases of indebted rulers but that is debt in the sense of illiquidity, they were still asset rich and able to melt the plate down to pay off the debts, so to speak.
This notion that everyone was universally worse off in the past and therefore even the lowest of the modern low are somehow better off in their current state and should be thankful for it is the crudest of fallacies. The trite example of modern healthcare being a shining example of why it's better to be poor today than wealthy 200 years ago is equally absurd considering that such care is often avoided by the poorest due to its cost right up until it's too late to do anything about it. You wind up with a situation where a person's only choice is to hope not to get sick since they can't afford the treatment or the missed work either of which could put them even further under water or on the street.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI think that image of monarchs comes from the movies? The famous inventory of Charlemagne's estate includes 2 cups, one chair and a towel. Their food back then was bad meat and oatmeal, no matter who you were. Indeed, just the existence of cheap antibiotics are likely to make the most humble of today's citizens live decades longer than anyone from the past.
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoYou think the image of monarchs comes from the movies and that actually monarchs had little more than a couple of cups? I'm sorry but that is a very delusional view.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoI don't think; I just read the evidence. E.g. http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/800Asnapium.asp http://legacy.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/800Asnapium.asp
- dinkumthinkum 11y agoThen your evidence is pretty terribly weak. I didn't bother with this link because your claim that monarchs did not live in opulence and that some link proves that is hard to take seriously.
- turar 11y agoThis has a good overview of a routine day in the life of a monarch. It's nothing like bad meat and oatmeal. https://www.quora.com/What-was-daily-life-like-for-a-medieval-king https://www.quora.com/What-was-daily-life-like-for-a-medieva...
- hjhgyhgd 11y agoA poor person today has access to thousands of movies and music on Netflix and YouTube. A poor person today has a vast array of meals they can purchase with less than one hour of minimum wage work. A poor person today can buy tons of generic prescription pills whose formulas were nonexistent during yesteryear.
- turar 11y agoA poor person has no Netflix, and doesn't have time for YouTube, she is either clocked in on the job, sitting in traffic to pick up kids from school, or cooking dinner. Besides, that kind of mindless passive entertainment is vastly inferior to what monarch had access to -- hunting, horseback riding, live music and shows, sex, etc. See pharke's response above regarding cheap processed foods.