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Carinthium comments on Some Thoughts Are Too Dangerous For Brains to Think - Less Wrong
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I flat-out disagree that power corrupts as the phrase is usually understood, but that's a topic worthy of rational discussion (just not now with me).
The claim that there has never been a truly benevolent dictator though, that's simply a religious assertion, a key point of faith in the American democratic religion and no more worthy of discussion than whether the Earth is old, at least for usual meanings of the word 'benevolent' and for meanings of 'dictator' which avoid the no true Scotsman fallacy. There have been benevolent democratically elected leaders in the usual sense too. How confident do you think you should be that the latter are more common than the former though? Why?
I'm seriously inclined to down-vote the whole comment community on this one except for Peter, though I won't, for their failure to challenge such an overt assertion of such an absurd claim. How many people would have jumped in against the claim that without belief in god there can be no morality or public order, that the moral behavior of secular people is just a habit or hold-over from Christian times, and that thus that all secular societies are doomed? To me it's about equally credible.
BTW, just from the 20th century there are people from Ataturk to FDR to Lee Kuan Yew to Deng Chou Ping. More generally, more or less The Entire History of the World especially East Asia are counter-examples.
I know somebody who used to work for Lee Kuan Yew, who has testified that in quite a few ways he at least has been corrupted (things such as creating a slush fund, giving a man who saved his life a public house he didn't qualify for etc).
That doesn't sound very corrupted to me.
If your standard of corruption is that stringent, you could probably make a case for Barack Obama being corrupted - the Rezko below-market-price business, his aunt getting asylum and public housing, etc.
(And someone like George W. Bush is even easier; Harken Energy, anyone?)
Um, you're going to have a hard time claiming Obama isn't corrupted, or that he was uncorrupt to begin with. (As you mention, such a claim is even harder for Bush.)
If the standard makes ALL leaders corrupt it doesn't favor democratic over dictatorial ones, nor is it a very useful standard. Relative to their power, are the benefits Obama, Lee Kuan Yew or even Bush skim greater than those typical Americans seek in an antisocial manner? Even comparable?
Useful for what? I agree it's not terribly useful for choosing whether person A or person B should hold role X, but I feel that question is a distraction- your design of role X is more important than your selection of a person to fill that role. And so the question of how someone acquired power is less interesting to me than the power that person has, and I think the link between the two is a lot weaker than people expect.
I'm presenting a dilemma. Either your standards for corruption are so high that you have to call both Yew & Obama corrupt, or your standards are loose enough that neither fits according to listed examples.
I prefer to bite the latter bullet, but if you want to bite the former, that's your choice.
Isn't the intelligent solution to talk about degrees of corruption and minimisisation? Measures to increase transperancy over this sort of thing are almost certainly the solution to Obama-level corruption.
No, because that's a much more complex argument. Start with the simplest thing that could possibly work. If you don't reach any resolution or make any progress, then one can look into more sophisticated approaches.
The reason to look at it that way is because it deals with problems of what is or isn't "corrupt" in general- instead, levels to get rid of (assuming one is in a position to supress corruption in the first place) can be set and corruption above a maximum level dealt with.