 There are many bad guys, many bad kings in history, nobody will denies this. But, first thing has to be considered is this. A king is of course expected by his own dynasty to just keep the dynasty alive, after all their family want to inherit this stuff. If the guy gets too crazy, then his own family will see to it that he will be surrounded by people who control him, and if that doesn't work, they will assign some close relative or distant relative to make the guy a head shorter. So kings were frequently killed because of these sorts of things. On the other hand, because he comes to power by accident of birth, kings are of course people who can be nice guys. Just nice daddies, nice grandpas and so forth who do nice things and are concerned about the wilderness and this and that and leaves the people more or less alone. On the other hand, if you ask yourself, how do people rise to the top in a democracy? The answer is you must be an intelligent bad guy in order to rise to the top. Imagine you would say, I will protect private property, I will not raise taxes, I will not engage in any type of redistribution, I will abolish all types of welfare handouts. What are your chances that you will rise to the top in a big country? The answer is you can forget it. Democracy is so to speak the guarantee that only bad people will rise to the top and the more so, the larger the country is. That might not be the case in a small village of 100 people where everybody knows each other and they know how they acquired their position. But as soon as the masses of people are large enough so that nobody knows from whom you steal and so forth, the worst people will rise to the top. Let's start with a few simple premises that we should be able to agree on as sensible people and as libertarians. Where you should be trying to move a political system too can be measured on an easy horizontal scale and placing yourself in the middle ready to make a choice in what direction you go. You can choose to go worse heading in the direction of hell or better heading in the direction of the ideal. I'll go out on a limb already and say that if you are not willing to make things better in order to come closer to the ideal and will accept absolutely nothing less than ideal right this second or it's no dice, then honestly your fanatic puritanism is useless and will never help you or anyone else reach the ideal that you claim to want so much. If you refuse to entertain the discussion of what is better or worse then save yourself the time of angrily leaving platitudes in the comment section of a video discussing what system is preferable over another. Because you'll notice pretty clearly that I and Hans Hermann Hopper who famously developed these ideas in his book Democracy, The God That Failed have never and will never claim that monarchy is the ideal. The ideal is voluntary societies where the people within them are not subjected to the initiation of force in order to sustain the society. There are many differing ideas on how exactly that society would look or be organised but it's pretty safe to say that if you're a libertarian or anarchist of any kind you would agree that this is the ideal and your interpretation falls somewhere within it. I have to get this disclaimer out of the way because even the most rational of people can get their knickers in a twist and become over-emotional and throw strawmen all over the place whenever Hopper is involved because they know more about helicopter memes than what his ideas actually are. Now as Hopper and I are anarcho-capitalists from here on out we're going to use the framework that all human rights stem from property rights. As you own yourself exclusively you can discriminate in who you do or don't interact with through freedom of association you cannot rightly be aggressed upon against your will and as your person is your private property all of your extended private property has the same rules applied to them. A violation of these rights is a violation of these rights. The violations do not become justified if other people took a vote on the violation or if the person violating them claims to have a God-given right. By comparing systems we have to make value-free judgments to truly say which is preferable. So let's begin by talking about the part that I believe is the most effective of this argument the incentives of the heads of these systems. Human beings have largely the same incentives to motivate and these are reflected loudest in their actions rather than their words chiefly is the advancement of their own material condition. Someone might butt in here and claim that altruism is a key incentive for most people but altruism that being action which gives you either no or negative personal gain A runs completely counter-intuitive to the first assumption so if you want to claim humans are altruistic you have to entirely scrap the assumption that humans are self-serving in which case you're not much more than a charlatan laughing stock and B as I said incentives are shown much louder in actions than in words and no politician in any system does what they do for no or negative gain they all receive very cozy salaries, power, discrete favours and under-the-table dealings as such the question has to become when dealing in a world with states how to turn those incentives in favour of preserving liberty and prosperity rather than plundering it. When in charge of the liberty and prosperity of a society a democratic oligarch has four or five years in control of it until they roll the election dice again and are just as likely to pass it on to an enemy as they are a friend but a monarch has most of their entire lifetime to control it and will pass it on to their own family so imagine that you are a person so powerful you're basically immune from accountability and punishment for anything you do if you had four years in charge of a store until you were subject to a hostile takeover all had your entire working life and were passing the store on to your eldest child how would your behaviour whilst you're in charge change between the two if you could get away with cooking the books, taking inventory not fostering a good working environment and having a revolving door for staff basically just being a dick for four years if you were driving the store into ruin then handing over the rubble to your enemy as a big middle finger why wouldn't you? you might think you're just such a great person that you'd never do that but you are first and foremost self-serving if you're pushed into a corner where you're going to be screwed over you might as well get the most out of it that you can while at the same time screwing over in turn the person that's coming in to screw you over but what about if this store was a family business that you've been passed down from generations ago and after your death will continue to pass down within your family over the course of your lifetime you would benefit far greater by managing it efficiently profitably and avoiding conflict by keeping on staff who've worked there for as long as you can remember rather than trashing it in your first four years and leaving nothing for yourself for the rest of your life and nothing to pass down to your heirs it is the hedonists paradox of the person who maximises short-term pleasure at the cost of greater displeasure in the long-term however if you're handing over the keys in the short-term and will gain nothing in doing so you might as well do what you can to gain in the short-term before that happens so immediately we can see the greater incentives that the monarch has to the democrat in preserving your liberty and prosperity rather than plundering it in a long-term relationship both you and the monarch would be better off by you prospering in the short-term relationship the democrat has little reason to care about preserving your prosperity rather than taking as much of it that they can get away with and as quickly as possible in general monarchy has just about the lowest time preference a political system can have and democracy has the highest if you're not familiar with that concept I have a very quick video you can watch on it and we know two general rules about time preference people who are above average in terms of success are extremely likely to be above average in having a lower time preference a person who can defer a bit of pleasure now for a lot of pleasure later exhibits wisdom, patience and restraint and is statistically very likely to be wealthy now this is never to say an individual monarch will always have low time preference but it is to say that a democrat will just about always have a high time preference when weighing up which is better out of two systems it's very easy to decide when one is guaranteed to go badly and pretty soon compared to one that has much better incentives to not go badly and quite possibly never in your own lifetime after all we can easily list some terrible kings from history but for all the infamous ones you can name there are tens if not hundreds more who aren't remembered simply because they didn't do much and reigned without controversy wouldn't that already be a nice change of pace to not be exhausted from reading political scandal after political scandal and getting outraged as often as we do it's very tiring now let's compare this to the Laffer Curve a modern macroeconomic model used to display how lower tax rates stimulate economic growth and passed a certain point become a drain out of the democrat and the monarch who is the most likely to restrain themselves in order to allow the economy to grow the one who will benefit from growth over the course of their whole life or the one who only has four years to benefit why would the latter care about the state of the economy after then no longer in charge of it if anything it makes them look better if they abuse the economy and set it up to collapse after the new guy takes over as we know from the Austrian business cycle theory artificially low interest rates create lots of present short-term investment distorting the market away from the actual time preference of consumers and after the fog of distortion fades everyone realizes they've been building things nobody actually wanted and it all comes crashing down the typical amount of time it takes from a sustained interest rate cut to turn into an economic crisis is around about five years just in time for the ruler of a democracy to transfer power and put their fingers in their ears while the bomb goes off in the other guy's hands if they can create a short-term boom which they will benefit from at the expense of a long-term crash that they won't lose from they're going to do it so don't be surprised that as the election cycle keeps turning so does the business cycle again if this part has confused you a bit check out my video on business cycles so let's move on from economics and discuss decentralization we've already established that voluntary societies are the ideal so from that we can clearly see the path to pursue is decentralization because the most decentralized you can politically get is the individual this presents a very obvious direction to move towards but you might be confused and think that monarchy is synonymous with centralization but that is pretty much completely ahistorical the largest empires of the world Rome, Britain and America all had a representative parliamentary or senatorial system despite two out of the three having very clear singular heads of state not forgetting that Rome had already expanded to half of its peak territory size explicitly as a republic where we've seen the most peace in European history has been during the times of devolved kingdoms such as the Holy Roman Empire not to be confused with the actual Roman Empire yeah it's a long story but what you need to know is that the HRE was an incredibly loose coalition of hundreds of autonomous regions of kingdoms principalities, duchies, counties and even city-states it lasted for 1000 years and while its borders shifted around during the time it's typically controlled all of modern Germany and Switzerland halves of Austria, the Czech Republic in France, the north of Italy and Croatia the islands of Corsica and Sardinia and the western edge of Poland a state lasting 1000 years is already an achievement that every conquering empire sought to attain but never could and the proof is in the pudding that over these thousand years the list of wars that the HRE was involved in is pretty damn short and the majority of their wars occurred during the early years sometimes wars did occur between two states within the HRE but were completely localized to just those two states if Ohio and Indiana went to war you wouldn't expect a normal everyday person from Texas to give much of a shit and these interstate wars are unquestionably more preferable to the first and second world wars and all of the other wars that occurred in the 20th century it was generally far more profitable for these states to keep the peace and trade between each other as none of them were large enough to conquer all of the others this was a thousand year long example of how monarchy does not at all have to mean a centralization of power and a guideline for how to make peace more profitable among states than war a concept that is almost completely forgotten today war is the primary way in how states expand their size and power without a doubt the best way to prevent states from going to war is to make it unprofitable for them perhaps the most effective single solution for that is sound money as the true meaning of perpetual war has been unleashed ever since the world came off the gold standard so having sound money is good but how do you keep it once you have it I think that contrasting the HRE to the modern American empire once again tells us as ever since the US dollar gained total hegemony over the world's economies through the might of their military and their empire sound money has vanished off the face of the earth until bitcoin arrived this is certainly not a coincidence the greatest mistake that America ever made was not splitting up into separate entities if the USA operated the same way as the HRE with at least every state being its own monarchy or even devolving down into counties being their own I think it's quite probable the gold standard never would have ended and we would not be counting our wars by the decade right now a country with over 300 million people and the largest military force in the entire world would not be tearing itself apart and leaving a vacuum to be occupied by another mega state in the death of its empire but the aim of the game with democracy is divide and conquer you only need to convince 50% plus one of your population and as we've been seeing before our very eyes right now it's extremely easy to divide your populace and motivate them to your side when you get them scared to the point of being delirious and then have them blame the other 50% for causing what it is they're so scared of now I will ask the question why exactly wouldn't a monarchy centralise over time well that is because there is simply far too much going on in the country for one lifelong ruler to deal with but not too much for a single democratic assembly to try and ultimately fail at managing like the economy monarchs delegated all regional and local issues to other members of the nobility who had the exact same incentives as the monarch the incentive of low time preference through rule drawn out over a lifetime and passed to an heir in medieval England for example you likely could not have cared less what your king was up to all of your current issues would be the matter of the elder man of your village or the baron of your county above him in our democracies people know that writing to your local representative achieves absolutely nothing as they have no real influence the decisions that affect your life are going to be made up to thousands of miles away from you by people you will never meet or share anything in common with but your elder man would live just down the road from you and far from being a powerless representative he was in charge of matters pertaining to your village if his village prospered he prospered he'd go to the same shops that you did see where you work attend church with you and celebrate holidays with you and your family he would then have the ear of the baron who also prospers when you prosper as he's going to be the baron for just as long as you're going to be whatever it is you are his incentives push him towards peace and prosperity rather than conflict and plunder just as the monarch is also incentivised towards throughout the entire chain of authority everyone shares the exact same incentives in regards to time preference and those incentives are the kind that foster peaceful and prosperous societies if the hre or the baron system was still around today with our modern advancements you can only begin to imagine how much more prosperous we would be if we had the incredible technology we had now without ever increasing tax rates perpetual wars and the ever increasing state how much better still would we be off by now our ancestors would have given up everything they possibly could to be in the material position that we find ourselves in but they would also find a country far more divided frantic authoritarian and at odds with itself than when they came from so finally what happens when it all goes wrong in either case in a world of monarchs you would of course have some despots and tyrants it's not perfect but not even our ideal scenario is perfect bad people will always exist and they will always do bad things if nothing else a tyrannical monarch is much easier to overthrow than a tyrannical democracy because you only have to take out one person and then maybe one court if you were going to overthrow a democracy where the hell would you start the leader of a party is nothing more than a figurehead a face to put a name to the actual roots of the system's power extend into a bottomless pit of bureau after bureau after bureau all intent on propping up the system of plunder which they benefit from a good party can't just dethrone a bad party and put things right and as the win condition in democracy is to divide and conquer I don't even think you can say a good party could possibly exist in the first place a tyrant king can change his mind very quickly as his prim and proper front lawn becomes full of pitchforks and torches but where the hell do you go to threaten a tyrant democracy its cold fingers are in every piece of the pie and are more akin to a tumour than a sword at least you can see a sword coming and try to defend yourself from it but a tumour will kill you before you even know it's there hidden, parasitic and ever-growing the democracy will never stop until it has completely consumed its host ultimately killing them and itself time preference is a non-existent concern for it all it is concerned with is maximum gain for itself at any cost for others a zero sum game and because our biggest priority should be creating a system of low time preference where the ones at the top and the bottom both gain from each other creating a positive sun game in the exact same style as capitalism it sounds strange to say but monarchy is a state with a private owner and democracy is the process of turning an entire country into the tragedy of the commons with no sole owner who is incentivised to preserve it the end result is chaos this video has been pretty lengthy but I've only covered three arguments here and there are still lots and lots more wouldn't you be surprised considering there's an entire book on the subject I have to reiterate once again even though some people will just not get it that I am not proposing an ideal, I am proposing something better than we have now yes monarchies can go wrong but if you say well what's to prevent X from happening in monarchy think very very carefully about whether or not you'll sound like a status saying well what's to prevent murder happening in libertarianism because murder happens right now if your critique of monarchy is literally something that already happens in a democracy then your critique lies with the human condition not a system and critiquing the human condition is absolutely pointless the only point worth pursuing is implementing a system where the human condition is incentivised to leave you alone just in the exact same way that capitalism allows humans to gain through mutual benefit not through the alternative of aggression take it easy