In China, politicians control billionaires. At least in theory, especially given how much the Chinese political establishment is attuned to the needs of the Chinese commoner, this does protect the national interest.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/business/china-parliament...
There is no altruistic motivation to better the lot of the common person. The only motivation is to maintain control.
I don't take it even as a control maintenance. They are now literally back to years when they were taking it as an insult for anybody to be more rich, and successful than a village party head.
It's 100% truth. Heard stories of people having their houses demolished for building them more fancy than the house of a party leader nearby, and that was not in the cultural revolution era, but barely 3 decades ago.
Bad old times are back.
The problem is when said politicians are a small faction of fallible people with unlimited power and no procedure of being peacefully replaced. Such a setup strongly hints at the fact that they really don’t want to give up control, which implies any policy is bound to protect their position first. They might act selflessly or benefit the nation at some particular point in time, but blindly counting on it being consistently so seems foolish.
Once you accumulate enough wealth and/or power unintended consequences just keep increasing. They never decrease. And the 6 inch chimp brain everyone has dooms it to blunder.
The East India Company did hand over ownership to the Queen after 200 years of raking it in. Why? And look at the state of the Queen today.
Xi and the Billionaires are trapped by their own hubris.
Xi Jinping is literally a billionaire.
In China the corruption of government officials is several orders of magnitude higher. We’re talking wholesale theft of govt assets in the billions of dollars.
Chinese leaders also have a much more tenuous hold on power. They aren’t smacking down Jack Ma because they are looking out for the Chinese commoner (though they might benefit), their top priority is looking out for themselves.
For now their priorities intersect with the chinese commoner, ie. Protecting themselves via serving the chinese commoner. Another bonus to this is the ability to make harder decisions now for the sake of the future.
The fact of the matter is that with this 'aligned interests' dictatorial style you can more done and plan for the future - so long as that future is aligned with your population.
I'd say the standoffish bipartisan politics of the US is far harder to get things done, but hey, as I'm sure some of you would say, it's better to have the freedom.
The bipartisan politics of the the US is not a bug, it’s a feature. It was entirely intentional that power was split and broad consensus was required to get anything done.
by the way, i actually really disdain founding fathers veneration, but two-party deadlock was infamously _not_ intentional. neither was our increasingly corporatocratic government.
It absolutely was.
Canada, where the majority party can pass whatever they want (their majority practically guarantees it), the unelected Senate almost always rubber stamps it and the head of state is one and the same as the ruling party, it's clear that the US design is intentional.
Nothing gets passed in the US unless: 1) House approves it, 2) Senate approves it, 3) President signs it. All three bodies are independently elected.
It was clearly intentional to be much more challenging to pass legislation in the US. What you call gridlock, I call the system operating as designed.
As another example, the NRA preventing gun control laws in spite of school shootings. The path the US has chosen is both poison and boon. The trouble is who gets to suffer from the poison?
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>PRC (national) interests
Governance priorities and development generally going right under Xi. Crack egg to make omelette etc. Incidentally, political executions also way down after his reforms, customary executions now "death with reprieve" sentences, where death is suspended. Way things are going, Xi's hagliography is going to be 10% bad and 90% good, especially if he can avoid war with US. Otherwise, hard to argue he isn't resolving or trying to resolves some of modern PRC's most entrenched problems across many domains.