> "Historically speaking, competent and well-run monarchies outperform republics in almost all metrics except maybe military"

Gosh, this is an incredibly long discussion and I don't know where to start. I tried writing a reply and I'm just not accurately capturing it - my ability to articulate all the history I've read in a short summary isn't so good. Let me try, though.

First, yes, the United States is amazing, it was the most well-designed republic in history during the early years. There's been times when republican government was suspended and dictator/imperial leaders came to power. Since I don't want to make this overly political, without naming names I'll say there's been two American presidents that acted very much like dictator-type emperors. They took emergency powers, suspended civil rights including habeas corpus, drafted men into military service, seized industry, and conquered large tracks of land. Both of those guys were popular but quite brutal and oppressive to people who opposed them, including arresting people for peaceful protest. The first of these guys even arrested elected officials that didn't agree with his war! Both of them seemed poised to control the United States for a long time, but then they both died in office, and the next administrations quickly put more safeguards to make sure America didn't get a tradition of presidents doing whatever the heck they wanted.

It's a really strange case - these guys are generally seen as good guys, and were good guys in some ways, so history treats them favorably, but they were both very dictator/monarchy-like once coming into power, ignoring the Senate and Supreme Court. Prior to them, I think the early American federal government was one of the finest government designs in history, so yes that is pretty incredible. Though, the USA has been gradually sliding towards what tends to happen in republics with corruption, politics, factions, and all that.

Generally speaking, you get lots of politics, bureaucracy, waste in a republic, and lots of corruption once people come into power. There's corrupt monarchies, but a good monarch can almost completely end corruption and waste in a short time. I'm thinking of someone like Tokugawa Yoshimune -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokugawa_Yoshimune

Or more controversially, the Napoleonic codes of law:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_code

It's very hard for a republic to get corruption, waste, and crime to zero, it almost never happens. It is very possible got a good monarch to clean house and get corruption, waste, and crime to zero.

Beyond that, my, where do I start? I'd recommend looking at comparable nations at comparable eras of history and see if republics or monarchies produced more art, science, architecture, trade, general happiness and health and prosperity, and things like that (admittedly difficult to measure). I'd read some thoughts by smart people on what happens in democracy through history, and monarchy. I'd look at the Federalist Papers to see how America was designed, I'd also strongly recommend Machiavelli's The Prince which has some analysis on the difference between monarchy and republics, and then I'd look at some of the Greek and Roman thoughts on the matter. The height of Rome came after Rome transitioned from a republic to an imperial monarchy, but this same transition sowed the seeds of its downfall with succession crises and the power of the Praetorian Guard. Likewise, the Ottomans and the Janissaries...

The most insightful eras for me is when there were a number of small states with similar resources and technology in a local era. The monarchic states in Renaissance Italy, the Greek city states, different eras of civil war in China and Japan... republicanism traditionally underperformed monarchy on average, but was less prone to catastrophically bad leadership, with the exception of rulers who came to power democratically but then seized power (that's what happened with the Chancellorship of Germany, there's been between 2 and 5 hardcore dictator American presidents depending on how you define it, etc). It's a large topic - if you have specific questions, I'll try my best to give a starting block of where to read and learn.