Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

The lesson is that when an autocrat needs a road to the airport (a good route of escape) he can just confiscate people’s property, making the road as straight and as quickly traveled as possible. As President Obama observed in his State of the Union address on January 25, 2011, when discussing the similar issue of building railroads, “If the central government wants a railroad, they get a railroad—no matter how many homes are bulldozed.” He was contrasting what autocrats can do with what he, as a democratic leader, cannot.

Democrats find using eminent domain politically costly and so are more likely to go around a village or house than to knock it down. In the event that a democrat ignores property rights, it’s likely that all the freedoms she must provide will culminate in people taking to the courts and the streets to redress any perceived wrong. A smart democrat, of course, tries to avoid such troubles, using eminent domain only when it benefits many people, especially members of the democrat’s constituency (the influentials). It is incredible to see how easily leaders can take people’s property in the People’s Republic of China and how hard it is to do the same in Hong Kong. When essentials are few, pretty much anything goes.

Roads are not the only infrastructure construction that seems to emphasize their private benefits in autocracies and their public benefits in democracies. Autocrats and democrats need electric grids. A recent study, for instance, shows that when governments expand reliance on a large coalition they shift electricity pricing and availability away from policies that favor industry and toward policies that help consumers; that is, the masses instead of the wealthiest in society.13 And then there are the Mobutu Sese Sekos of the world, who have worked out how to use electric power to advance their political survival.

Mobutu famously replaced local electricity-generating capacity near Zaire’s copper mines with a hydroelectric station that was more than 1,000 miles away. This empowered him to cut off electricity at the touch of a button, guaranteeing that he, and not some local entrepreneur, controlled the flow of copper wealth. It’s worth noting that the power lines bypassed all the people along the way. That’s the right sort of infrastructure project taken up by someone who wants to use public policy to secure his hold on power.

Massive construction projects, like the Aswan Dam in Egypt and China’s Three Gorges Dam, are very much like Mobutu’s power grid. These sorts of projects are great for autocrats. Although they dislocate vast numbers of people, they also generate vast corruption opportunities, making them gems of private rewards as well as providers of basic public infrastructure. It is noteworthy that they also cost vastly more to build than comparable dams in the United States or other democratic countries, where such projects serve primarily to advance public—not private—welfare.

All leaders need to provide some public goods in order that the people can work to pay taxes. This is just as true in other organizational settings. Corporate bosses cannot expect their employees to produce in isolation. Communications, training, and team-building skills promote productivity, although they also facilitate the coordination of protest against the boss. For this reason, not all corporate phones connect to everywhere.

Even the heads of crime families provide public goods that help mobsters earn, of which perhaps the most important is reputation. Mobsters would find it much harder to demand protection money if people did not believe they were backed by muscle. Mafias also provide muscle and deterrence to protect their members. Killing a mafioso is not to be undertaken lightly. Mobs also provide lawyers. Each of these services is a valuable reward. But more importantly, they keep the mafia earning. As with autocrats, mob bosses provide those public goods that help mobsters produce the wealth that their bosses need to stay on top.

Public Goods for the Public Good

In small-coalition polities, public goods often serve the narrow interests of the leadership and only indirectly the interests of citizens. The situation is almost entirely different for those who rely on a big coalition. For such leaders the desire to stay in office dictates that they must satisfy the large coalition’s desire for access to good education at all levels; to quality health care at all levels; and, most importantly, to the means to make the wishes of the coalition easily known by the government at all levels. It is surely no coincidence that all but one (Singapore) of the twenty-five countries in the contemporary world with the highest per capita incomes are liberal democracies; that is, societies that enjoy rule of law, with transparent and accountable government, a free press, and freedom of assembly. These are places that foster rather than suppress or obstruct political competition. They foster such competition not out of civicmindedness but rather out of the necessity of assembling a large coalition of supporters.

Some of the richest people in the world live in tiny countries with tiny populations, like Iceland and Luxembourg. Others live in countries with vast populations—the United States or Japan—while still others live in expansive territories with relatively modest populations, like Canada or Australia. Some of the wealthiest people live in religiously homogeneous societies like Denmark or Italy, but others reside in religiously heterogeneous nations such as the United Kingdom or the United States. Many of the richest countries are in Europe, but others are in Asia, North America, or Oceania. Some were imperial powers like Britain and France; others were themselves colonies like Canada or New Zealand.

What, then, is it that these countries have in common? It is not their geographic locale, their culture, religion, history, or size. What they all have in common is that they are democracies and therefore dependent on a large coalition, albeit of different shapes and sizes. And being dependent on many essentials, all of these regimes share in common the provision of the cheap and yet hugely valuable public good called freedom.

Although such crucial freedoms as free speech, free assembly, and a free press are cheap to provide, autocrats avoid them like the plague. Democratic leaders, no doubt, wish they could avoid these freedoms since it is these public goods that make it easy for opponents to organize to overthrow them. But those who depend on a large coalition can’t escape them because they cannot amass a winning coalition without guaranteeing large numbers of people the right to say, read, and write what they want, and come together to discuss and debate at will. And then democrats must listen and deliver what it is their constituents want or someone else will come to power and do so.

But when incumbents rely on a small coalition of cronies, then coalition members are readily satisfied by being made rich through corruption and cronyism. They do not risk these riches by demanding that incumbents siphon money away from them and into effective public policies. Under these conditions, leaders can readily limit the provision of public goods in general and freedom in particular if they so choose. Hence, democracies escape Hobbes’s state of nature and autocracies generally don’t. Indeed, we can see just how dramatic the difference is in escaping the state of nature by looking at what happens when nature exercises its freedom to wreak havoc. We have in mind the consequences of natural disasters like earthquakes, cyclones, tsunamis, and drought. These certainly are not political events, but their consequences are the product of how rulers best allocate revenue and how people’s freedom to organize shape allocation decisions.