Coyote Blog has a hilarious, and largely true list of "You Know It's a Dictatorship When..."
- Michael Moore portrays the country as a kite-flying paradise
- Jimmy Carter sanctioned their last election
- The UN certifies that there is no genocide
- They sign friendship pacts with other dictatorships
- They are a member of the UN Human Rights commission (not 100% foolproof but getting closer every year)
- They were once a French colony, and/or France is opposing sanctions against it
- Their people are impoverished and they lag the world in economic growth
Funny all by itself, and given some strong backup from the serious links he embeds in his list. The #7 link re: long-term economic freedom and its direct relationship with economic prosperity is especially worth pondering.
And the comments section is just as good.
Yeah, CNN and the rest of the leftist media dependably in Walter Durranty mode.
Never met a socialist mass butcher he didnt like.
He left out the part of sending them abroad while holding relatives at gunpoint back "home" to keep them from defecting
Clintons scheme of keeping a Cuban slave surrounded by Castros invited Cuban Kilers on American SOIL !!!, was a nice touch, showing just how "centrist", ahem, a dependably morally obtuse leftist he truely was.
Brothers Hussein used em for sex toys and live tiger food, Mc Dermit flew to Iraq to get a piece of that action, I suspect.
Course, that would only raise his status with the morally obtuse leftists that elected him, perhaps his co-patriot could comment on Saddamns day care centers.
How about this, you know your a leftist hellhole with mass graves but good Socialist credentials when you get visuts from the likes of Billy Carter and Roger Clinton and maddie bomber Albright gives you accolades on the fine food the good cognac and the massive parade dancing.
With only 3 shot in the head after you left for falling out of step.
You know it's a dictatorship when:
The President shares a family name with the finance minister, Ambassador to the U.S., at least one previous president, and the Defense/Army Minister.
Trouble is, there's a couple of those.
China disproves #7. A dictatorship is able to reach a very high level of industrial and commercial developement (Hitler is a good one as well), and for that matter Saddam enriched himself + relatives pretty well on the economical scale.
The thing to wonder is whether a dictatorship, like China, can maintain its claim of the economy once more complex sectors, like financing, are home-based. These may apply for more democracy, by debate of by force.
Jonathan Even-Zohar,
A large number of statist nations in Asia have enjoyed economic prosperity. China is not really a dictatorship, but it is a one-party state. In a way that makes more along the lines of a state controlled by a fluid oligarchy or aristocracy (if we want to use the last term rather fluidly).
Point number 7 might not be correctly formulated.
The thing is that there is a link between prosperity and the level of freedom the people of a country enjoy, as Mises, Hayek (two Austrian economists) and Milton Friedman (from Chicago University) pointed out.
Again, a free society has to be democratic, but the contrary may not be right: a democratic society may not be free, for instance if most of the mass media is controlled by a party or, although elections are periodically held, caos is rampant.
Please, note that some dictatorships owe their economic success to the fact that they are succesfully granting some basic freedoms and rights, such as personal security or property, that previous governments (even democratic ones) were unwilling or unable to defend.
Usually, those dictatorships induce distortions in the market that ultimately lead to serious problems, that threaten economic development. China is so big that it may take decades this to happen.
A clear example is Spain. During the sixties was the second developed country in growing rate, after Japan, because Franco government provided a secure environment to carry out economic enterprises, something that were unable to do the democratic governments since 1917. The problem is that in those years much of the investment went to industries that were not internationally competitive, triggering many problems as Spain joined the EU and industrial duties were revoked. Today the problem is Franco's regulated real estate market and social house renting laws, that have caused a huge real estate bubble, so huge that no democratic government dare to do something that might burst it during its term. Much of those investments were or will be lost.
A free society is more prosperous because allocates its investments in a more efficient way.