Hacker News Reader

Comment by decafninja | Hacker News Reader

I feel dictators/autocrats come in two flavors.

The first genuinely feel they know what is best for the country and how to best govern it. They might still enrich themselves and their cronies in the process of course.

The second are primarily out to enrich themselves and their cronies. The country exists to support this selfish goal.

Of course this is not black and white, but rather a spectrum but various historical figures seem to strongly lean to one side or the other.

View on HN

And history repeatedly shows that even if you get a dictator of the first kind, it’s an unstable equilibrium of a system that eventually leads to a dictator of the second kind.

And that can happen with the same person !

Yes, but it's not always true - see cousin comment. There are examples of actually good dictators in history - but my back of the envelope estimate is that its like 1 in 20.

Which Lee Kuan Yew was well aware of, and set up a constitution that makes it easy to peacefully remove a government.

The only reason the PAP is still in power is because Singaporeans don't want to get rid of them.

Gerrymandering is a popular tactics used by PAP in Singapore, to ensure they stay in power. In most democracies the Govt., Supreme Court and the Election Commission are independent of each other. Thereby elections are run fairly. But in Singapore, the election commission and supreme court is run by the govt. in power. This makes it easier for the party in power to sustain it's reign.

I'm not saying they don't give themselves unfair advantages in the election, but that's a very different thing to, say, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia where power was simply seized and held onto with no accountability to the people.

If the PAP torpedoed the entire economy because of some stupid beliefs of the leader, they would be quickly and quietly removed.

Gerrymandering would be somewhat curtailed (not nullified, I agree) if most of the people would have supported the opposition. They just don't. In the last General Elections, PAP's margin of victory did shrink from the past but it was still a pretty big margin[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com