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August 23, 2008

Life's so much easier without democracy. For the rulers anyway.

Thomas Lifson
Dan Riehl thinks Obama may have lost the election with his stupid remarks about China's airports, railways and port facilities being "vastly superior" to our own. Of course, the secret to China's success in building infrastructure quickly is the lack of little details like property rights for residents who get in the way, environmental impact statements, unions, and other trappings of a free society.

A Chinese official quoted by The Economist sums it up nicely:

Chinese official Xu Li said, Once a plan is made, it is executed. "Democracy", she says, "sacrifices efficiency."

This explains why:

In all this activity it greatly helps to have a secretive planning bureaucracy and a government that brooks little dissent. In Britain it took as long to conduct a public inquiry into the proposed construction of Heathrow's Terminal Five as it took to build Beijing's new airport terminal from scratch.

There was no consultation with the public on the terminal. Nor was there any public debate about the construction of Beijing's third runway, notwithstanding the noise pollution already suffered by thousands of nearby residents.

You don't have to look to the rich countries of the West to find examples of the price of democracy. China's fast-growing rival India is currently experiencing great difficulty improving its aviation infrastructure because it doesn't simply decide where it wants a new airport, throw-out the peasants, and build away. India has a democracy and its people have rights. Evidently, Obama prefers the Chinese way.

As Jonah Goldberg's excellent book Liberal Fascism points out, in the 1920s and 30s, there were plenty of "modern" thinkers in the West who believed democracy had stalemated itself, and looked with awe on what had been accomplished under fascism, which they saw as a superior system precisely for its ability to get things done the way China now does.

When Barack Obama speaks what's on his mind, a very unpleasant set of values become apparent. This impatience with democracy would be a serious problem with Obama, should he ever get his hands on power.

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