What are positives and negatives for absolute monarchy?

It is easy for us to think of the negative aspects of an absolute monarchy.  We live in a democratic country and so we have been told ever since we were young why monarchy is bad and democracy is good.  One major reason for this is that, in an absolute monarchy, no one has any guaranteed rights.  The monarch has the right to do whatever he or she wants at any time.  The monarch could take your land or other property.  They could throw you in jail because they did not like what you had said.  There was no guarantee of any sort of rights because the monarch was all-powerful.  The second major problem is that there is nothing to protect the people and the country from the whims of a bad absolute monarch.  If the absolute monarch is a bad person, or simply has harmful ideas, there is no defense.  There is no one to stop the monarch from getting their way.  The monarch can, without anyone to check them, enact policies that are evil or policies that are simply destructive and harmful.  These are the main negative aspects of having an absolute monarchy and they are very powerful arguments against such a system of government.

However, we can say that there was at least one good thing about having absolute monarchy.  The greatest positive point about this system is that ensured that things in a country could get done quickly and efficiently.  Here in the United States, we have a political system that prevents the government from doing anything quickly.  Our system has all sorts of checks and balances that make it hard to get things done.  For example, we all know that something needs to be done to our system of entitlements, but our leaders cannot agree on what to do so nothing gets done.  The same is true of our tax code.  In an absolute monarchy, this does not happen.  If the monarch has an idea, that idea can be implemented very quickly because there is no one to say “no” to the monarch.  Right now, that might look good to some Americans who feel frustrated by the lack of action by our democratic government.

So, the great thing about an absolute monarchy is that it can get things done quickly.  However, the flip side of this is that the monarch can do terrible things (or just misguided things) just as easily as they can do good things.  This means that the absolute monarchy is efficient, but it also means that there is nothing to mitigate the harm that a bad absolute monarch can do to the country.