Popular kings? There are plenty. King Abdullah is very popular. The Ming dynasty oversaw an extraordinary explosion in trade and art. The Medici family planted the seeds of the Renaissance. The Meiji Emperor dragged Japan, kicking and screaming, into the modern world.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "king", since that has quite a specific meaning. I really meant a leader, or group of leaders, who have a great personal stake in the country and its progress. Supreme leaders care about posterity, whereas parliamentarians always have someone else to blame.
Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences, or the politician scrambling to get out a press release so he can be seen to be "doing something" about the latest opinion poll?
I do not have anything like the faith in the long-term viability of democracy, at least as we know it, that you have. I do not see how a disinterested, ignorant population has any capability to govern, or even vaguely direct, a country's path better than, say, the Standing Committee in China.
> Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences
So are you willing to argue that Kim Jong-Il is a positive force in the development of North Korea? What about the USSR under Stalin? Are these all better forms of government what what the US has now?
Nope. Those are both terrible examples of what can go wrong. I provided some examples of it not going wrong.
So the question is, do we throw out the entire notion of concentrating power in one person or small group of people, because they might abuse it? Or is it possible to devise a system that retains the advantages and minimises disadvantages? Because we know the consequences of giving that power to several hundreds of people - deadlock.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "king", since that has quite a specific meaning. I really meant a leader, or group of leaders, who have a great personal stake in the country and its progress. Supreme leaders care about posterity, whereas parliamentarians always have someone else to blame.
Who do you think makes the best long-term decisions? A leader who knows they will still be there in 20 years to accept the consequences, or the politician scrambling to get out a press release so he can be seen to be "doing something" about the latest opinion poll?
I do not have anything like the faith in the long-term viability of democracy, at least as we know it, that you have. I do not see how a disinterested, ignorant population has any capability to govern, or even vaguely direct, a country's path better than, say, the Standing Committee in China.
Anyway, time will tell.