Re: National prosperity: Is it linked to democracy or dictatorship or some other fact
National prosperity: Is it linked to democracy or dictatorship or some other factors?
Let's start with basic (and rather simplistic) definition of the three terms involved.
- Prosperity - Economic viability of a nation, and the buying power of its citizens
- Dictatorship - One party (man) rule by an ideology, or a monarch or an army general.
- Democracy - People chose / change their leadership at regular intervals
This post is trying to generate comments on the following.
Many Western intellectuals believe that
democracy ----> (leads to) Prosperity
while
Dictatorship ------> lack of prosperity
Is that true?
Because Chinese example shows that
dictatorship -----> prosperity (100s of times more than comparably sized India).
Are there factors **other than ***democracy that result in prosperity?*
There must be other factors.
A Person's character is what he/she is, and none is dictator or democrat from their mother womb. You can find extreme dictator in character coming through democratic route and you can find extreme democrat in character coming to power using force (military) and people may call him dictator.
Prosperity, development, and economical growth is nothing to do with dictatorship or democracy. It is to do with sincerity, commitment, efficiency, determination, and honesty of the person in power at top, be that person dictator or democrat.
But then, there is a big problem in third world countries. Prosperity, development and growth in third world countries is hated by most who are rich, powerful, affluent, and influential, as when country prosper their power base, dependency of others on them, their importance in society, control and authority over others, and financial superiority reduces.
Since in third world countries, people contest elections with their own money, so only rich, powerful, affluent, and influential contest elections and win (or can afford to lose), so when these people win, instead of bringing prosperity, development, and growth, these people bring misery, loot and plunder, mismanagement and bankruptcy.
Nevertheless, bad dictator is worse then worst democrat, because democrat depends on many others and do not have absolute power, and if they go beyond a certain limit of corruption and destruction, depending on tolerance in armed forces, army moves in to stop them, so their harm is limited. As for bad dictator, it is very difficult to stop him as army is under his control, and thus only revolt in armed forces can stop bad dictator, and thus bad dictator can harm much more than bad democrat. On the other hand a good dictator is better than best democrat as when it comes to serving the country and doing good for the people, dictator can do that with mostly free hand but democrat cannot.