I won't question that american leaders have acted like dictators at times. Though technically, they were all still democratically elected and subject to impeachment.
From my knowledge of history, a representative democracy is just more efficient than a dictatorship. It's true that monarchs can reduce corruption, waste and crime to zero. But I think that the US has been a prime example of the positive tradeoffs that come from those things. An analogy would be a startup that only ships bug free code. It's good, but they'll probably get outperformed by a more nimble company that tolerates defects here and there.
Personally, I think that many of your examples of empires that outperformed republics (specifically Rome vs Greece) are a result of conquest and military power. A young empire can do a much better job of fielding an army than a young republic can. But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens. I think a lot of that is because we were isolated from many other powerful empires on the american continent so we had time to mature to our capacity.
Think of it almost like a game of Starcraft or Age of Empires. If you have one player in "Republic mode" and another player in "Dictator mode", the dictator will get more resources in the beginning allowing him to crush the republic. But if the republic is given time to build, he'll have a resource advantage in the long run. Which is why I'm still not so sure that a well-run monarchy can outperform a republic.
> But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens.
I think in modern times -- say after 1850 or so -- there's a strong element of truth in this and the republican/democratic tradition works better than the monarchial/autocratic one.
Having said that, here are some counterexamples in WW2:
- Hitler was more effective at quickly re-arming Germany and conquering its enemies in 1933-1940 than a republican leader would have been.
- Stalin was more effective at getting his country to produce good quality weapons in the right quantities than any other leader in WW2 was.
- Were Britain and America any better than France at coping with the initial Axis onslaught? The French army is often written off because it was quickly beaten by Germany in 1940, but at the time it was at least as good qualitatively, and vastly bigger, than the British ansd American armies. It's at least arguable that Britain and America only won that war because they had good natural defences -- the English channel for Britain, and the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the USA.
From my knowledge of history, a representative democracy is just more efficient than a dictatorship. It's true that monarchs can reduce corruption, waste and crime to zero. But I think that the US has been a prime example of the positive tradeoffs that come from those things. An analogy would be a startup that only ships bug free code. It's good, but they'll probably get outperformed by a more nimble company that tolerates defects here and there.
Personally, I think that many of your examples of empires that outperformed republics (specifically Rome vs Greece) are a result of conquest and military power. A young empire can do a much better job of fielding an army than a young republic can. But as the US proved in world war 2, a mature and functioning republic has a much greater capacity for production because it utilizes the skills of more of it's citizens. I think a lot of that is because we were isolated from many other powerful empires on the american continent so we had time to mature to our capacity.
Think of it almost like a game of Starcraft or Age of Empires. If you have one player in "Republic mode" and another player in "Dictator mode", the dictator will get more resources in the beginning allowing him to crush the republic. But if the republic is given time to build, he'll have a resource advantage in the long run. Which is why I'm still not so sure that a well-run monarchy can outperform a republic.