If you get a good dictator, things get done with little friction, because the power rests on a single person's shoulders. But if you get a bad one, you're stuck with it.
Democracy might be slower and less inefficient, but it's reliably slower and less efficient.
If someone has a bad take, downvote them. If someone doesn't understand, but wants to, either upvote or don't vote. It's really that simple.
Ironically, this is the most reddit sentence I’ve ever read.
To add more substance and avoid be-redditting this thread even further: I think the crucial difference in a good forum culture is that “bad takes” aren’t reflexively buried - they’re dismantled, disproven, and alternatives are submitted. That way anyone else with similar “bad takes” is guided to a better POV. This is actually productive.
Downvotes are for irrelevant material, which isn’t productive.
Then they can actually read the comment they are responding to.
Most "dictators" in Eve actually end up being pretty good at their job, because it is a cutthroat market, and the most precious currency is players willing to fly for you and they can easily leave to join another group should you piss them off and not take care of them.
The U.S. was clearly designed with the second interpretation in mind. The revolution was a result of taxation by the British Parliament, and their anger at the British crown was that the king did not stop the parliament. The president / executive branch is a single person, and it represented their view of preferring an accountable monarch over distributed accountability dispersing Parliament.
They also designed the house seats with very lower upper bounds on the number of people represented by a single person, and the design of voting districts reflects a view of accountability over representation.
However, the prevailing meta game of politics is using the representation interpretation. And the design of the U.S constitution is quite bad when that is the understanding. It's just not designed for it. And the pubic has been trained, in almost pavlovian way, to interpret the "accountability" interpretation as "populism" with negative connotation.
It's a bit more complicated. Colonials paid lower taxes than people back in England, too.
See also https://www.econlib.org/archives/2016/12/bruce_bueno_de.html
> His stories about George Washington, none of which I knew, are even more fascinating. Bueno de Mesquita claims, quite plausibly, that a huge part of George Washington’s motive for fighting the Revolutionary War was to protect his substantial, and critically placed, landholdings in the Ohio Valley. I’m not saying that I agree with him, but his story made me realize that a large part of my belief in GW is romantic: because I learned about him so early in life, that romantic view is harder to shake and I’ve been less willing to put GW under the public choice microscope than with any current or recent president.
> An excerpt about GW’s wealth:
>> His last position, just before becoming President, was President of the Patowmack Canal Company–the Potomac Canal, as we know it, from the Potomac River. What that canal did was bring, make it possible to bring produce from the Shenandoah Valley–which George owned–up to the port in Alexandria, which had been built by Lawrence, by the Ohio Valley Company, in which George had a direct interest, and shipped goods out. So it was a very profitable undertaking–or so he thought it would be, in the long run, for him. And that’s what motivated him. Most people think of Washington as–besides a great hero, which he certainly was–as kind of a gentleman farmer. Economists have estimated the worth in real dollars adjusted for inflation, not appreciated, of George Washington’s estate, in contemporary terms; and it’s about $20 billion dollars. He is by far the wealthiest President. He is the 59th wealthiest person in American history. Three of the American founding fathers are in the list of the top 100 wealthiest Americans in all of history: Hancock, who was wealthier than Washington–made his money smuggling; and Ben Franklin, who was not quite as wealthy, who made his money because he had a monopoly on the printing press. These are the folks who led the Revolution. These were not the downtrodden. These were not the oppressed. These were people who stood to lose huge amounts of wealth because of the King’s policies. And so they fought a Revolution. Which was, by the way, not very popular. Sixty percent of the colonists either were neutral or opposed to the Revolution.
I don't think we should necessarily take traitors at their word.
(Especially when they talk a big talk about freedom and mankind, but keep slaves.)
For example, the President could appoint the cabinet and judges, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could negotiate treaties, but the Senate has to approve them. The president could veto a bill, but Congress can override it. And so on, and so on. That's not a dictator.
The president has been moving closer and closer to a dictator, though, because Congress has become more and more useless. They have become so tied up in political trench warfare that they can't actually govern. They often can't even pass a budget, which is their most basic job. So the president rules more and more by executive order, which is very much not the way the system was supposed to work.
As usual, there's a Wikipedia article listing some others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benevolent_dictatorship
(Relevant disclosure: I'm not French.)
That’s why the US founders loathed democracy. A Republic was the answer they came up with.