And that requires the highly enlightened despot model of monarchy with checks and balances via a judiciary and a legislative body. Which is to say... has never happened. (Though Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands came very close.)
MY biggest criticism of our current system is that we hit the reset button every 2, 4, 6, or 8 years, meaning that any project that will take 30 or 50 or 100 years to see fruition is unlikely to happen. We're all human, we get swept up in the drama of elections (we can't blame the media for the horserace, because we keep watching). Humans are incredibly bad at long-term planning as a group. Since we experience our political world in discrete, election-cycle sized chunks, we think of progress in those same chunks. Which is sort of fine for things like funding biomedical research or defense spending, but is totally unsuited to things like education policy (where we don't see results for a minimum of 15 years) or climate policy (where we might not see results for a century.) We're also, as a group, bad with delayed gratification, and the election cycle rewards instant or near-term gratification far more than delayed gratification, even if that later reward is exponentially larger than today's. (Same thing with quarterly versus long-term profits in corporations, so it's not just a governmental issue.)
I'd like to see a governmental system that had (for lack of better terms) a Chief Executive Officer (or group) in charge of the long-term process -- still accountable, still subject to law, but specifically tasked with things like the electric grid, mass transit, renewable energy, and space -- projects that require major investment up front, and serious heads in the game, and take much more time than a couple of election cycles. I'd like that office or group of offices to be held for a minimum of 10 years, and the elective process to be one of approval -- CEO gets elected, when re-election time comes, it's not competitive, but approval-based. If CEO gets approval, zie stays in the job. If zie gets a vote of no confidence, then there is another election. Ideally, it would be a small group with rotating spots, to ensure continuity. (Truly ideally, I'd like lots of regulations on who can hold those jobs -- minimum levels of education, maximum levels of income, perhaps gender/class designations.) I'd also really like an elective coup system to displace any individual/group that goes off the rails, be it through age/infirmity, coercion or too much group-think.
That same government also needs a Chief Operating Officer -- the Commander in Chief, who sees to the day-to-day business of government -- plus a legislative body that is actually beholden to the citizenry, and an independent judiciary. Oh, and a mechanism for short-circuiting the very human tendencies towards passing the buck and plausible deniability. (Yeah, yeah, dreaming.)
The problem with hereditary monarchy is usually leadership failure -- the monarch becomes either tyrannical or a figurehead. Every person in every society needs to be able to control certain aspects of their situation, and to be controlled within their environment, and both need to be in balance, which perpetually shifts. Aristocracy and monarchy are the extreme end result of a small class of people with too much ability to control and not enough control exerted upon them opposed to a large class with too little ability to control and too much control exerted upon them. Those poor deluded Geeks for Monarchy are sadly under the impression that they would be the aristocrats, and a bit ignorant of the history that proves again and again that those sort of systems often end with aristocratic heads on pikes or under guillotines. They also miss the fact that historically, most aristocratic families only endured for 3-4 generations. There's a regular pattern -- 2 generations of climb, 2-3 at height, then decline while others are rising. As a form of wealth accumulation and preservation, it's not substantially better than any other.
The big advantage I can see to the constitutional monarchy system in the UK, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands is that the monarch does retain the power to act as a set of brakes if the system ever hurtled out of control. (It would certainly be the monarch's last political act if it happened, but just having the emergency control helps.) Those monarchs have the power to dissolve their parliaments if something is going terribly wrong -- say, deciding to attack another country on false pretenses, or disenfranchising a segment of the citizenry, or looting the national treasury, or pure ineffectiveness -- and call for new elections. It doesn't happen, but I'd say part of the reason it doesn't happen is because the parliaments know that it could. (In theory, ours does have this for the House, but then there's gerrymandering.)
But monarchy isn't the way to get either a set of brakes or a system of long-term continuity of government. When it happens within monarchy, it's a happy accident -- that system fails to produce either long-term ability or effective stopping power more often than it produces them. Long term ability requires a shift in the culture, from a short-term profit driven system to permaculture, and that in itself is a difficult shift in long-term thinking. Stopping power can, and should, be legislated -- likely as a single issue rapid implementation mass voting system (which can be done with current technology.)
To have a good monarch means essentially enslaving that person - exceptional and rigorous education from earliest childhood, strict social controls on their decisions to ensure that they aren't liable to coercion, manipulation or blackmail, restriction of their personal freedoms for the sake of both continuity and security -- while also depriving that person of the experiences that engender empathy and commonality. It's a good way to raise robots, but a bad way to raise children, and therefore an awful way to raise someone in whom one wants to invest massive power.
And the author is wrong entirely about financial systems. Aristocracy is no better at creating a stable financial system than democracy. It's not like bubbles are something new -- see: Tulip Panic, South Sea Bubble, Louis XVI's financial morass (which directly caused the French Revolution), Bank of England 1834. It is better at creating an insular financial system and protecting itself. (Recall, the reason that the British House of Lords could run up so many personal debts was because they were legally protected from punishments like debtors' prison.) But self-protective, insular systems don't innovate and they don't take risks. This is why the majority of the world from 5000 BCE to 1700 CE spent most of their time digging in the dirt and praying for rain. Aristocracy is GREAT if a world filled with infectious disease, back-breaking labor and rampant injustice are your ideas of stability.
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