Some? Acutally a lot of them. The first time I heard this argument was when I read Moldbug (and he got it probably from Hoppe). It sounds ridiculous, but when you actually think about it, it makes much more sense. However, when you think about it even more and don't just cherry pick some good rules with absolute power of the past, you realize your first hunch was correct and the idea that monarchy is true libertarianism is fucking stupid.
Were there some good kings? Yes. Were there kings (and queens) who actually gave people quite a lot of freedom? Sure. But there were also rules who...
- ordered spectators in a colosseum to be thrown into the pit with lions, just for fun.
- were good and effective rulers who became mentally ill and almost destroyed their whole kingdom (there were a lot of them)
- killed people just for fun
- ethnically cleansed regions just for fun
- were lazy fucks or just too young and gave the responsibility to advisors etc. They then abused their power and exploited the common people. When the common people became angry, the advisors could just blame the king.
- some kings ravaged their kingdom for a woman (or boy) they loved.
Of course, many kings were killed or expelled when they were too bad. But this isn't really assuring when your family has been killed or your farm destroyed before his expulsion (The Soviet Union doesn't exist either anymore. I don't really think that it's so comforting for people who lost family members during Stalin's reign). And even very bad rulers can retain their power for a very long time, if not even generations. Many dictators we still have today are fucking insane, yet their power is rarely threatened by the people. One crazy fuck (don't know who anymore. It's a dictator of one of the stans) even made language reforms and invented new words. Now the word for "bread" is the name of his mother. Furthermore the most "peaceful" kingdoms/empires had (mostly implicit) mechanisms that kept the power of the king restricted. Let's take the Ottoman Empire:
- The Sultan had almost absolute power. However, Janissaries (elite infantry units, most of the members were children of Christian families. They were taken away by the Ottoman Empire and trained as fanatic muslim warriors) had a lot of power and the Sultan was often forced to compromise with them. Janissaries figured out quite quickly that most of them actually come from Christian families. Hence it was often their interest to protect the Christianity dominated region, since it was highly possible that their biological family could live there (Some Janissaries even converted back to Christianity and became the enemy of the Ottoman empire, but most of them stayed loyal and used their power to get privileges from the Sultan).
- The Ottoman empire was an empire with a lot of different ethnicties, religions, customs and languages. The only way the Ottoman Empire could control such a diverse population was by granting them enough freedom, so that they won't revolt. It wasn't uncommon for Arab Jews, Palestinian Arabs and Christian Armenians to live in the same city, often in different quarters, speaking their languages, wearing their ethnic clothings and even using different laws, while leaving the other people alone.
Compare this to North Korea where the ruler has more or less absolute power, only has to compromise very rarely and reigns over a population that is very homogenous in every immaginable way.
Moldbug isn't really advocating for monarchy, his idea is rather that a country should be ruled like a company (He used the example of Steve Jobs and California structured as if it was an Apple company). This didn't age that well, since in the year 2020 we probably know now that companies can be as oppressive as governments (At the moment it's not the state who advocates for restricting freedom of speech, but companis and universities. Universities today in America are as far as I know much more privately owned than in the past, hence even here it can be said that the free market doesn't always guarantee freedom. Anti-racism diversity trainings started actually in the private sector in the 90's and were only introduced to universities later) and Steve Jobs wasn't this genius people made him out to be. Most of the technology he used for the first iPhone wasn't even developed by him, but actually by the state.
Does Moldbug have some good ideas? Yeah, the idea of the cathedral is probably somewhat true, even though the idea that Protestant Christianity is the origin of modern leftism isn't new and he exaggerates it (he thinks Obama is basically a communist). At the end most of his ideas aren't very original and his writing is mostly distilled opinions of people who came before him. I highly doubt that NRx will ever become mainstream, as it is even cringier than many fringe leftist ideas like anarcho-feminism.
He was at least cringy enough to even become a character in a TV show:
