I wonder how we might reconcile the actual behavior of Africa’s last pure monarch (reported by Craig below) with the prediction Hans-Hermann Hoppe has made (at p. 95 of the linked article) about the behavior of a pure monarch, aka “private government owner”, by contrast to a democratically elected official, aka “government caretaker”:

A private government owner will tend to have a systematically longer planning horizon, i.e., his degree of time preference will be lower, and accordingly, his degree of economic exploitation will tend to be less than that of a government caretaker;

The deductive logic of Hoppe’s prediction is straightforward enough (his conflation of planning horizon, measured in years, with degree of time preference, measured in percent per year, is unimportant here). The problem lies with its practical applicability. The reason the King of Swaziland seems to be grabbing and consuming all he can, while he can, may be that the King suspects that his ownership is unlikely to endure very long. If this kind of insecurity is a common problem for real-world monarchs (and shouldn’t we expect it to be, given the logic of rent-seeking and the history of coups and inter-monarch warfare?), then there is little to no real-world relevance to Hoppe’s prediction of lower time preference (which assumes secure monarchical ownership). There is accordingly little to his associated conclusion that pure monarchy is better for the public than democracy.

Question for political historians: what percentage of monarchs have held ownership of the government to a ripe old age and successfully passed it on to their heirs?