Comment by janalsncm 13 hours ago
The US is quickly acquiring the downsides of authoritarianism without any of the upsides: for example increased government efficiency and reduced crime.
Singapore is safer in the dead of night than New York City is in the middle of the day. (Population is smaller than NYC but bigger than LA.)
Do you dispute the homicide rate I mentioned? To be more specific, homicide rates are 60x higher in NYC.
To put it another way, it would take two months of living there to match a single day’s risk of being murdered in NYC.
Of course this does not mean fewer rights leads to more safety. Under a bad government, you get nothing in return for your rights. But we should be explicit that there is a tradeoff to be made.
1. Comparing a city-state to a city in a large country is kind of a silly exercise. There is no hard border at ("everything's legal in") New Jersey, for example.
2. Singapore has a very different firearm regulation regime than the US (or even New York State or NYC). Your argument could make sense as an argument in favor of more tightly restricting firearm ownership in the US.
3. Your argument doesn't even attempt to generalize to other authoritarian regimes. One could equally compare NYC's murder rate with that of Japan or Switzerland, which did not have to use authoritarianism to achieve low homicide rates.
It's not silly to compare, but it is silly to draw causal relationships. Especially when cherry-picking
- Singapore is authoritarian and has a low homicide rate
- Venezuela is authoritarian and has a high homicide rate
But let's also compare Homicide and GDP[0]. There's multiple interesting things to say from graphs like this. Though I still wouldn't conclude a causation here.
People love data when it confirms what they already believe but people don't like putting in the work needed to interpret data. Granted, the latter is not easy. But maybe if we're not math lovers we probably shouldn't claim to also be data lovers.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rate-vs-gdp-pc?x...
1. The city vs country distinction cannot account for a 60x difference in safety. There are many other countries which are also orders of magnitude safer than both NYC and the US.
2. One person’s “firearm regulation” is another’s authoritarianism. A regulation simply means one’s ability to have a firearm will be taken away in some cases i.e. fewer rights.
3. There is no point where freedom ends and authoritarianism begins. It’s a matter of the types and number of rights which are protected by the government. Anyone who believes removing the right to bear arms in some circumstances agrees that there can be a tradeoff between freedom and safety which was the core of my argument, that the US is becoming less free while becoming no more safe.
I guess it depends what you consider a crime to be. Like suppression of human rights, corporal and capital punishment, and so on.
> Do you dispute the homicide rate I mentioned?
You didn't mention any rate prior and you provide no supporting evidence, multiple sources for each is preferred. Is this supposed 60x higher rate per day or per person?
and as others have said, comparing a city (urban) to a whole country (mixed) is silly
The rate is per 100k people over a year, which is how homicide rates are usually reported. To my understanding, these numbers aren’t disputed.
Singapore is a city and NYC is a city. Of course no comparison will be perfect, but the significant difference in safety will not go away through clever accounting.
> But we should be explicit that there is a tradeoff to be made.
Did you read what I wrote? There is no "tradeoff". Authoritarianism doesn't guarantee crime reduction and it certainly is not the only way to achieve it. I live in a vibrant democracy with low crime and an almost totally unarmed police force (thanks to strict gun control and a public health care system).
Illiberal government moves the ceiling of what is possible, in particular for crime fighting but not only, without a guarantee of success.
At this level it's almost a tautology. Liberal governments choose not to do things because they would be illiberal, and illiberal governments don't mind.
It doesn't mean illiberal governments are better - on average, data would probably say otherwise, causation or correlation.
But undoubtedly, there are illiberal governments that achieve very good outcomes for their residents through illiberal means - surveillance, "streamlined" decision making etc. You can push the envelope of what the gov can do, at the expense of liberal values, and still achieve something else that's objectively good.
And the US is pushing this envelope for no benefit for its citizens, it would seem.
Elected authoritarianism is arguably worse than many other forms of authoritarianism. A King has a continuing interest in building and maintaining the value of his Kingdom as well as an interest in a multi-generational outlook on investment and strategy. Trump has 3 years left to plunder everything he can with no incentive of ownership to maintain anything.
Yeah okay but Singapore is great and if the crime still exists but hidden from the public, that's good for the public!
Also, you're the only one talking about Mussolini.
> The idea authoritarianism reduces crime [...] is a fallacy. Crime still happens
There's a whole range between "reduces" and "eliminates", and introducing the "elimination" argument is a strawman.
Authoritarian regimes do cut down on crime committed by the oppressed masses. It's a side effect of the heavy handed control that allows those in power to stay in power. Severely punishing crime is one more means of exerting more power and control over that population, the leaders can't afford to let regular people get away with flaunting authority. But the upper echelons will always commit crimes or abuses especially against those they control because they can afford to get away with it.
"Decreased crime" under an authoritarian regime is probably only true if you don't consider anything the state does a crime.
I feel there's probably a formal academic topology for this, but it seems on one end you have party-dominant or single party authoritarianism (Singapore arguably) and on the other end you have cult of personality style. The former is often more stable and functional than the latter, but neither guarantees optimal decisions. And some regimes like North Korea give you the downsides of both!
Democracies are overwhelmingly the most efficient governments. Look at long-standing democracies and autocracies - which are the most efficient and effective? The least corrupt?
Autocracies are like communist centrally-planned economies. If the autocrat isn't all-knowing and all-good, they can't possibly know enough to run things - or even to make enough decisions to avoid being a bottleneck. One of the great advantages of democracies is that the people affected have power - they have a seat at the table. They know what's going on and what they need. If you want to plan flood relief for a town in Mississippi, ask the people there what the problems are and what they need. If you want to regulate software development, developers get input.
That goes for social, political, financial, economic, foreign affairs, and all other policy.
Regarding crime, the autocrat and servants commit plenty of that. Generally, thieves don't break down your door in the middle of the night, kidnap you, and imprison and torture you for years without trial - or just seize all your assets and prevent you from working. Also, what source do you have on crime levels in autocracies - where could reliable information come from? And as another commenter said, I don't see a correlation between crime and democracy.
(Singapore's very unusual nature makes it a poor example.)
There have been a few autocratic-esque governments that have gotten around the dictator information problem by basically implementing a free-ish market by fiat.
This is how much of UAE and to the extent Singapore is one, does it.
The dictator will basically let the free market operate and then interfere a few percent off the top of that. They are not torturing enough people to destroy their economy.
> There have been a few autocratic-esque governments that have gotten around the dictator information problem by basically implementing a free-ish market by fiat.
The way I understand that is they allow some freedom and thus receive some of the benefits. They still are far behind democracies socially, politically, economically, militarily, etc.
China did the same for awhile, starting small when Deng Xiaopeng took power and expanding until Xi took over.
Freedom of individuals, which allows a country to harness all of their talents and imaginations, is an enormous advantage. People forget that freedom is the most powerful thing in the world.
I realize it's a flawed analysis but both UAE and Singapore are higher on the Index of Economic Freedom [than USA], although much worse in certain social aspects. They also are more efficient in their military spending.
Is reduced crime an upside of authoritarianism? I would argue there are lots of authoritarian and non-authoritarian governments with high and low levels of crime. In research crime tends to be more about the people and culture, not income or government style, and whether a government is hard or easy on crime seems more like a policy decision.
The government is hyper efficient right now. The only efficiency guaranteed under authoritarianism is the will of the authoritarian gets executed without any checks or balances, which is very efficient. Trump wants tariffs, Trump gets tariffs, despite laws saying he can't. Trump wants troops in the cities, Trump gets troops in the cities despite laws saying he can't. Trump wants to bomb boats, Trump gets to bomb boats -- no committees, no votes, no reviews, no assessments -- just exploding boats. Trump wants to bulldoze the Whitehouse, well then by God it's gone the next day. Talk about efficient!
That this doesn't translate into benefits for you personally or the citizens generally does not mean the system is not working very efficiently right now.
"Efficient" is a word that has a positive connotation, but in the context of authoritarianism it means something very very bad for liberty, freedom, civil rights, and democracy -- all things that get in the way of authoritarian efficiency.
This incorrect. A couple hundred billion have been collected to date. You can find any number of sources with a simple search. Here's one:
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs....
The idea authoritarianism reduces crime or increases efficiency or put more bluntly "at least Mussolini made the trains run on time" is a fallacy. Crime still happens, it's just that those connected to the regime are protected from consequences, see for example the blatant corruption in Russia or the untouchable "Princelings" (CCP officials offspring) in China.
And no, Mussolini didn't make the trains run on time - he took credit for rail improvements started before he took power and then led his country into disastrous wars that destroyed it.