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Comment by sikim | Hacker News Reader

As you probably noticed from the article you linked, strong leadership was what made it possible. President Park is a controversial figure in Korea because of his ruthlessness and dictatorship but nevertheless contributed significantly to the country's economic growth. Under his rule, if people were caught accepting bribes from someone, they would face severe punishments for sure. Currently there is no such leadership (current president is a daughter of the President Park, ironically), and people hear news about corruption and wrong use of government budget all the time, especially in military projects where bribery and nepotism are commonplace.

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I don't know much about the old dictatorship. I do know this story is told about many dictatorships.

In the others, the reality is that the dictatorship is even more corrupt but because there is no freedom of the press, nobody reports it and the dictator publishes their propaganda about how clean they are and how they are jailing people for corruption, when really they are jailing their opponents (like President Xi in China today). Who would have dared to report about corruption by the original President Park, or to defend his opponents?

Democracy produces the least corrupt governments in the world. One big reason is that people are free to report it, the leader can hose their job in the next election, and an indepedent judiciary can convict the leaders friends (and protect their enemies). The corruption is there in any government or human institution; if we aren't reading about it, that's when we have a problem.

Democracies also produce the most economically and technologically advanced economies and societies - look at any list; democracies dominate it. The 'strong leadership' approach, for all its appeal to some, doesn't deliver the goods. For all the chaos, giving input to millions rather than to just one person produces much better results.

Democracy is usually the best, and dictators are usually bad at managing economies, but there are exceptions.

Every once in a while, people luck out and get a competent dictator with proper leadership & economic understanding to direct resources to appropriate areas for economic growth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Kuan_Yew

Both brutal dictators; but widely considered to have done a fine job steering economies.

> Both brutal dictators; but widely considered to have done a fine job steering economies.

One does not balance the other. Stalin industrialized Russia; Hitler rebuilt the German economy.

You missed the part where Stalin ruined the economy through collectivization and and Hitler ruined the economy because of, you know, going to war.

Calling Lee Kuan Yew a brutal dictator is a very huge stretch of the term.

> Under his rule, if people were caught accepting bribes from someone, they would face severe punishments for sure.

[citation needed]

...Or was that a rhetorical device, meaning if people were caught accepting bribes, then of course they were already out of political favor, so they were heavily punished?

In the late years Park's servants would "recruit" women to serve him. In fact there was a young girl in the last night when he was shot by his own aide while drinking. So I find it very hard to believe Park would have minded his minions doing creating accounting.

Some people say Park wasn't corrupt because he did not amass personal wealth, but that argument misses the fact that he had no intention to retire. The country was his, and would remain his. Moving money to his own bank account would have been like moving money from the left pocket to the right pocket. Why bother?

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