And yet the irony is that some of the freest countries around with high HDI and GDP are constitutional/ceremonial monarchies. And then you have luxurious and prosperous microstates like Monaco and Liechtenstein which are both democratic yet retaining monarchs who actively exercise their executive powers.
Then there's the controversial question of whether a monarchy's efficacy may in fact be greater than that of a republic, a topic that authors such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have explored.
There are a lot of ironies when it comes to power. Another big one, relating to the article under discussion, is that it's by the CEO of a company dedicated to taking money from the poor and giving it to startup founders so that they may become rich.
I think a lot of the confusion is because power operates as a hierarchy (or oftentimes, a graph), and each layer of the hierarchy tends to oppress the layer below it while itself being oppressed by the layer above. Hence you had poor blacks in Reconstruction being oppressed by the KKK (largely composed of poor white sharecroppers), who were being oppressed by the Northern bourgeoisie, who were being oppressed by Gilded Age industrialists who were being oppressed by populist politicians who were allied with the poor white sharecroppers. That's why you may have a monarchy with strong support from the common people: the monarchy keeps wealthy business owners in line, which keeps them from oppressing ordinary citizens. It also explains the current political situation in the U.S, where the Republican party is an uneasy coalition of wealthy plutocrats, small business owners, and poor rural religious whites, while the Democratic party is an uneasy coalition of academics, white Yuppies, unionized black factory workers, and immigrant Hispanics. The plutocrats oppress the yuppies, who offend the small business owners, who oppress the immigrants, who take jobs away from the rural poor, who discriminate against blacks.
Then there's the controversial question of whether a monarchy's efficacy may in fact be greater than that of a republic, a topic that authors such as Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have explored.