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buybuydandavis comments on Political ideas meant to provoke thought - Less Wrong
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Let's assume the average government official is smarter than the average member of the populace - of North Korea. Is this "potentially" a win, and for whom?
I think you need to make your reasoning conditional to what Karl Popper considered to be the necessary ingredient for free societies: The ability to remove the government without violence.
Note that much of US government at all levels is a civil service next to impossible to remove by political means, and I assume this is similarly true in most politically "stable" countries.
Well, during the 19th century the US had a system whereby the entire civil service was replaced whenever the party in power changed.
Pretty sensible. I believe people eventually concluded that this was terribly partisan and corrupt. Which it was. But the current alternative is a vested aristocracy with a perpetual right to rule.