Scott Alexander asks, “Are traditional monarchs good leaders?”

Are CEOs good leaders? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Would it be better to make every important company decision based on popular vote? No! Even if a CEO is kind of an asshole, having a single decision-maker is crucial to the stability and order of a company.

Say that I am the CEO of a company, looking to sell a hundred tons of lumber to a furniture company. I walk into the furniture company, and ask the first guy I see, “who’s the boss around here? Who do I talk to to sell this lumber?”

The guy responds, “We don’t have a leader. We’re a democracy. We’ll have to vote on it.” The lumber CEO shrugs his shoulders, then walks off and takes his business elsewhere.

Not only does democracy consistently lead to worse decisions, it leads to decisions that take a hundred times longer and cost a hundred times more to implement.

Leaders want other leaders to talk to. Not collectives. The only reason the United States works at all is that many civil servants, such as those in the State Department and the Pentagon, are there for life, and can’t really be fired. They get accustomed to dealing with one another and their counterparts overseas. Their bosses get shuffled around every four to eight years, but since it barely matters who their bosses are, business goes on as usual.

The question is not so much whether monarchs, specifically, are good leaders (though they often are), but whether there should be one leader, or 314 million.

Homer put it plainly:

“A multitude of rulers is not a good thing; let there be one ruler, one king.”

A multitude of rulers leads to chaos, demagoguery, pandering, plutocracy, and so on. The optimization pressures being exerted on the government by mass opinion and popular vote are not healthy.

Depending on your time preference, the chaos might be a good thing. If you want instant gratification without working for it, to pick up a few pieces of candy from the broken piñata, then democracy is peachy keen. But if you’re interested in creating orderly structures built to last for the future, it’s a disaster. This is what I mean when I say monarchy is not for everyone.

A monarch has an incentive to build for the future, since the government is the personal property of his family. Democratic politicians, on the other hand:

Political agents invested with transient authority by multi-party democratic systems have an overwhelming (and demonstrably irresistible) incentive to plunder society with the greatest possible rapidity and comprehensiveness. Anything they neglect to steal – or ‘leave on the table’ – is likely to be inherited by political successors who are not only unconnected, but actually opposed, and who can therefore be expected to utilize all available resources to the detriment of their foes. Whatever is left behind becomes a weapon in your enemy’s hand. Best, then, to destroy what cannot be stolen. From the perspective of a democratic politician, any type of social good that is neither directly appropriable nor attributable to (their own) partisan policy is sheer waste, and counts for nothing, whilst even the most grievous social misfortune – so long as it can be assigned to a prior administration or postponed until a subsequent one – figures in rational calculations as an obvious blessing. The long-range techno-economic improvements and associated accumulation of cultural capital that constituted social progress in its old (Whig) sense are in nobody’s political interest. Once democracy flourishes, they face the immediate threat of extinction.

Democrats consider Republicans the enemy and have every incentive to plunder the government while they have the wheel. Republicans have exactly the same incentive. Democrats want to enforce “income equality,” whatever that means, and Republicans want to blow up foreign countries in the Middle East for no tangible security interest. Both continually expand the scope and reach of the state until it dominates society. A monarchy is the only form of government that has incentives against expanding the size of state. Many historical monarchies only consumed 3% of national GDP or less.

This chart shows total federal spending as a percentage of GDP since our founding:

That’s just federal. Include state spending and it goes up to 40%.

Why does the government need to be 40% of the GDP instead of 5%? Because of central planning mania. In a monarchy, there are social institutions that naturally push back against the spread of centralized power (like the aristocracy, which would have local control). In a democracy, nothing can fight it. The practical impact of rabble-rousers such as the “Tea Party” is an insignificant dent. The effect of a “libertarian President” like Rand Paul would be similarly laughable. We need to change the system itself, not play shell games with the leader.

If a nuclear blast took out Washington tomorrow, what would happen? A whole lot of chaos. An insignificant low-level minister would likely take over the Presidency. Structures of governance, though huge, are not well-integrated into society. Respect for local leaders is low. People would be on their own for a few weeks, months, or years until central order could be restored.

What would happen if a nuclear blast took out a monarchical capital? It would have a much better chance, because authority and legitimacy would be vested in local leaders who are intertwined with the community by virtue of their cultural status and past hierarchical order-giving. Today, our cultural leaders are celebrities. These are people who entertain us on television, not individuals capable of leading men.

The upsides of monarchical leadership are: 1) low time-preference (long time horizons), 2) real, durable authority, 3) order in decision making, not subject to fear of polling results, 4) personal loyalty and identification with the society itself, not a political party.

Political leaders have allegiances to their own party. They pretend to be aligned with the nation as a whole when they become President, but how can that be possible when the majority of their social contacts and values are strictly formed by activism within their party? Aristocrats and their leader, the monarch, could in fact be aligned with the nation as as a whole.

Demotist government functions as a set of training wheels. By monopolizing 40% of the economy, it holds everyone’s hand and trains them to be dependent on it. A monarchy, on the other hand, trusts the economy to run itself rather than being micromanaged by a bunch of bureaucrats. It exists as a kind of stern guidance, rather than as a robotic helicopter parent.

A monarchy would probably need to initially tax at around 20% as it gets going, or it could just confiscate/sell existing government assets and not need the 20% tax. The point is that it could lower its taxes far more than a republic could. In today’s world, 5% may be impractical. It may be closer to 10% or 15%. Still, far less than the United States and European socialist democracies. In a future post, I will outline specifically which areas of government can be cut. Most of medicine and education, for starters.