Is there such a thing as a good king?

Cyrus the Great, Wu Zetian, Mehmed the Conqueror, etc

>>17773962
I guess Wu Zetian doesn't count as a king but you get the idea

>>17773895 (OP)
There can be good individual kings sure. But there is no guarantee his successor will be competent, although there usually was a degree of safeguards to prevent mentally challenged rulers from doing anything, although the lack of an actual authority in itself is a problem. Kings usually operated to benefit themselves, mostly because they were not really beholden to anybody other than magnates who shared far more in interest with the monarch than normal people did. Feudal monarchies had far less care for common people due to this and magnates actively strangled any growing middle class until they grew too large.

Monarchy in investing supreme authority to a single person is more arbitrary, unstable and often less competent than a more council government like the Roman Republic was or modern parliament democracies. Of course there does exist highly competent monarchs which enact positive sweeping reforms but such things can also emerge from democracies and have. Modern dictatorships are essentially the new form of monarchies today, they have all the same power and act in the same way, the only difference is they are far more dependent on popular support than a monarch is

>>17773895 (OP)
There is none Good but the Father, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try
also >>17773962 Wu Zetian was a terrible ruler by every traditional chinese metrics. She was a usurper and a reformer which set an arguable precedent for usurpation, which villified the Legalists, and she was hated by the Confucianists early in the second Tang Period and the Neo-Confucianists established after the Tang for disrupting the perennial social harmony of the chinese State and not abiding to proper social conduct
>inb4 but muh Tang golden age setup
the Tang were precepitated into social unrest because of the very fact she took power, and China suffered another usurper merely another generation later

>>17773895 (OP)
Absolute power is usually a high risk high reward, it can either transform a country into a superpower if the leader is competent and benevolent or it can absolutely cripple a nation if they're a megalomaniac.

The problem is that absolute power is either inherited or seized through a coup, both of which heavily select for self-serving megalomaniacs.

>>17773895 (OP)
"good" means something which has desirable qualities or is morally right and a king can fulfill both definitions, so yes.