I think it's a fairly safe conclusion that a benevolent dictatorship can be a near perfect form of government - as long as it's benevolent. Long stretches of prosperous european monarchy supports this. The problem is what happens if the king goes mad - either by obsessing over some military objective or empire or such, or medically mad, with his court scheming to rule in his place. Other, similarly long stretches of european monarchy shows this.

Democracy biggest success, despite its significant imperfections, is the orderly overthrow of government every 4-5 years. Even monarchy doesn't guarantee an orderly transition of power.

The problem is ... it is never the monarch that governs, but the bureaucrats and the networks of power and favour that grow under the protection of a monarchy/dictatorship. After a while, the Peter Principle takes over, and the system becomes sclerotic and corrupt, no matter how benevolent the head of the dictatorship. The "continuous revolution" of a democratic system goes some way to remedying that defect, but it is at best a partial fix. This is a problem that all large organizations suffer from, be they democracies, dictatorships, public organizations or private companies: All types of organization, from armies to zoos are vulnerable to sclerosis, and the larger and more long lived the organization, the more vulnerable it gets.

>This is a problem that all large organizations suffer from, be they democracies, dictatorships, public organizations or private companies: All types of organization, from armies to zoos are vulnerable to sclerosis, and the larger and more long lived the organization, the more vulnerable it gets.

Not only that, the larger it gets, the smaller the proportion of what gets replaced at every election. Even if we get some new Congressmen every two years, we still have all the same spies, SWAT teams, prosecutors, defense contractors, etc. And the things with staying power throw money at perpetuating their own existence, so that the Congressman dedicated to halting the proliferation of SWAT teams or reducing the defense budget doesn't stay a Congressman long enough to attain the committee assignments that would allow him to actually do it.

Yes, true. The biggest problem with this is the short-term planning of everything... Have a look at the map of Germany and Austria-Hungary (I'm European and I didn't know they were so vast). "Vienna was then the capital not of a minor Central European country but the hub of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire that extended over much of Eastern and Southeastern Europe". It made for a good breeding-ground for new idea's (think the time of Freud and others).

Map: http://www.worldology.com/Europe/world_war_1_effect.htm

"long stretches of european monarchy shows this"

I'm struggling to think of many examples from the history of the UK/England/Scotland (and there was a civil war 350 years ago to end absolute power of the monarchy), were there saner royals elsewhere in Europe before everyone switched to keeping their royals as fairly powerless heads of state?

Don't make the mistake of believing current monarchs are powerless...

The Queen of the commonwealth for example and shut down the parliament if she wants to (there is a complex process to do it, but it can be legally done), or buy and sell state stuff freely. Of course, in information age, she knows that if she abuses these powers, people will get upset and overthrow her.

Also in Japan, the monarch legally has no power, but the people obey him anyway, this happened many times in Japan history, and seemly the population like it that way because the monarch become a "failsafe" of sorts, every time some non-monarch leader do major shit, the population can rally behind the emperor again and return his absolute powers (and usually subsequent emperors fix the issues, until someone pull a WWII...)