No Stupid Questions

Damn out of 90 comments I read only a couple that made any sense.

It's because it's a complex legal transition to g othrough, because laws are a dumb series of words that's usually tied to the whateverness the highest for of power is.

It's still objectively odious to grant birth based rights or role to certain people over others.

The only practical positive I can see is that it's such a dumb system that it can be fromally abused to enforce a certain degree of stability when the proper democratic process go and fuck itself, but 1) there's other ways 2) at that point the crown storically sides with the degenerates (becaue power by birthrights is a degenerate concept after all).

Republics give you Trump....

What I mean is this:

A Prime Minister is not a president. They are simply the leader of whichever party has he most seats in parliament and is therefore the "face" of the government in many ways.

Most importantly this means that there is no such thing as "executive orders" because there is no "executive" branch, per se. Meaning even if we (Canada) had fucked up and elected Trump-lite, Pollieve, his ability to do the same shit Trump is doing would be severely limited in that everything goes through parliamentary vote without exception (for the most part).

A ruling party has something called the Emergencies Act, that can, to a limited degree, allow them to enact a few things without parliamentary vote, but its use is generally highly controversial and is still very controlled by judicial review.

Long story short (too late, I know) is that the tsunami of bullshit that Orange Hitler is doing is because he's using executive orders to enact things and then fighting congress in court when they push back rather than getting congressional approval BEFORE enacting it.

Something that is far more limited in a governmental system where that much power HASN'T been given to one person.

The point of a constitutional monarchy is to transition away from an absolute monarchy towards a republic.

A constitutional monarch may have a wide range of powers, depending on the constitution. It doesn't automatically mean "powerless figurehead."

Given the way the US has been recently, I'm willing to admit that there may be some benefit to having a leader in some position of power that had been there a long time, and has, more or less, been training for the responsibly since birth.

Of course, there are plenty of arguments against such a leader, but the least of which is how much you have to stretch the word "training" to make it fit that sentence above.

In the UK, the Royal Estate provides the government with a huge income (even though 25 percent goes to the king so he can repair his fancy castles).

How would you get rid of them?

All the constitutional monarchies started as just monarchies. Every step between those days and what's around now have been gradual, and usually very stable.

If you want to completely sever royals from government, it isn't as simple as snapping fingers. Some of them, you'd have to unmake the constitution and rebuild it from the ground up. And that isn't something that everyone in those countries wants, so you'd have to get people on board and willing to deal with the transition instability.

Undoing all the baby steps from "King Bob, first of his name, absolute ruler" to "king Fred, he's kind of a figurehead, but kinda has a minor role too" is, in the cases I'm aware of, a damn hard one to unwind. Each movement comes along with other laws and decisions that would have to be untangled to sever the ties.

Not an impossible task, but a long, difficult, and expensive one. Yeah, you get enough people on board, throw a revolution, and you bypass all that, but then you've got to rebuild anyway, which means you'll be building the new government in baby steps with compromises and concessions and political expediency. With no guarantee of something better at all. It could end up better, but it could end up with a nation in collapse.

Again, if enough people want it, and accept that risk, it could happen.

But most people want stability. Very little gives the sensation of stability like hundreds of years of the same family being in place. Sure, you get assholes and idiots among them, but you have the constitution and the actual government to keep it in check. Another fifty years down the road, it changes faces and life goes on.

Tourism

I think taking a broad view, there are quite a lot of constitutional monarchies that are really great places to live (Sweden, Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Canada, the Bahamas, Japan, to name a few). There are also quite a lot of republics that can claim the same. So, from a sort of human development POV, I don't think it really matters very much.

[EDIT: Should've added that there are also plenty of republics and monarchies that are disasters, too. My point is that there's no consistent pattern of one works and the other doesn't.]

Sure, monarchies are a bit daft but I think 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' is quite a good rule. Especially since spending time on fixing things that ain't broke is time you could be spending on fixing things that are broke. I live in the UK and we have a lot of major problems that need our attention. It's better to focus on those than have a big argument about the King when, as we can see from international comparisons, the King isn't really the issue.

In the Netherlands, it's not like the King or his family aren't doing anything. They are somewhat like special ambassadors for the country. They also are highly connected, both to people in governments and other people in a position of power. And they do answer to the Parliament.