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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (44372)	9/17/2002 2:24:38 AM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

If there is anything the US system represents, it's the ability for anyone to have their grievances addressed in court under a genuinely fair system with appellate review.. Without these property rights and the system to uphold them, it's inevitable that dictators will rule... For they represent, and are supported by, the elite and wealthy aristocrats. This is true, and I'd be the last to suggest socialism as an option. Socialism has an equally pernicious counterpart in the developing world, and this is the sort of neo-feudalism masquerading as capitalism that comes about when systems are corrupted by powerful elites. Rebuilding a government after a dictator departs is not just a matter of clearing out the dictator and his immediate circle. Dictators tend to appoint close cronies to take key positions. These in turn appoint their own buddies, and so on down the line. If the dictator has been in long enough the whole bureacracy becomes tainted with this sort of patronage system, where officials are responsible not to a job, but to a patron. This reaches all the way down, through every level of the government. (This is another way in which Iraq and other 3rd world dictatorships differ from Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan, both of whom took over buracracies that were already functional). Corruption becomes entrenched, every post becomes not a point of service to the nation but a power base for the individual holding it. The difficulty of tearing down such a system and constructing a new one in its place are enormous. No system will work if the goals of the people operating the system are not in line with the nominal goals of the system.