There's a variety of different ways to consider systems of governments and compare them. The criterion you use to compare them, though, varies widely.
You can neglect the human aspect of it, and assuming that people are ants or robots can come up with super-efficient systems of government that would work well in an idealistic situation. (ones like Communism or Utopias)
However, those don't work in reality. Instead, we have to do some more complicated reasoning.
Understanding the best system of government first requires that you understand the purpose of government.
So, why do governments exist? What purpose do they serve? Why did we create one?
My opinion on the purpose of government:
Governments exists for a single purpose:
to protect the rights of its citizenry.
That means ensuring that other members of society do not infringe on your rights, as well as preventing another country from infringing on your rights, etc.
For instance, look at how the USA got started. Why did we rebel against Britain? Because we thought our rights were being violated. In the Declaration of Independence, the entire thing is focused on the rights, and the Constitution was structured to ensure the rights were protected.
So, if government's only responsibility is to protect rights, then what's the best system?
Well, obviously it'd be the system that did the best job protecting rights. But in order to do that, you need to understand what rights you have.
The Declaration of Independence mentioned "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Also, the Bill of Rights lists a lot of them, but several of them are often irrelevant. I want the true, universal rights; basically, human rights.
The UN has a good list.
Okay, so what are some qualities of a system of government which would be able to guarantee protection of those rights?
- Clear and effective law structure (system of accountability)
- Strong law enforcement (to protect rights domestically)
- Strong and capable military (to protect rights from foreign powers)
- Non-corrupt government and governing officials (to ensure the above remain as they are)
So, let's compare that to our current system of government in the USA:
- Law structure is pretty bad. 4/10
- Law enforcement is decent. 8/10
- Military is pretty good. 9/10
- Government is rather corrupt. 3/10
So, I rate our government with 24/40, or about 60% of what it should be.
So, what I indirectly tried to show in the above is that it's not entirely dependent on the "system" of government (i.e., democracy, republic, aristocracy, etc.), but more on the way it's set up and managed.
In other words, there's a lot of ways to get to the same place. No single form of government is ultimately superior to all others. This is true because of the "human variable" someone mentioned earlier.
So, what systems of government are the hardest to screw up and the easiest to get right?
First of all, there are a variety of ways to categorize the types of governments. Here are some categories:
- Aristarchic (Aristocracy, Geniocracy, Kratocracy, Meritocracy, Technocracy)
- Autocratic (Authoritarian, Autocracy, Despotism, Dictatorship, Fascism, Totalitarian)
- Democratic (Democracy, Direct Democracy, Representative Democracy, Social Democracy)
- Monarchic (Absolute Monarchy, Constitutional Monarchy, Elective Monarchy, Emirate, Monarchy)
- Oligarchic (Bureaucracy, Ergatocracy, Kritarchy, Netocracy, Oligarchy, Plutocracy, Stratocracy, Timocracy, Theocracy)
- Pejorative (Bankoccracy, Corporatocracy, Nepotocracy, Kakistrocracy, Kleptocracy, Ochlocracy)
- Other (Adhocracy, Anarchism, Band Society, Chiefdom/Tribal, Constitutional Republic, Cybersynacy, Nomocracy, Republic)
There's a lot of them. Most of them are bad and stupid to even consider, though, but for the sake of simplicity we'll keep them grouped together. For the "other" group I'm only going to use Republic.
So let's consider how the groups relate to having the criterion to work as a good governmental system:
- Aristarchic - Effective, hard to corrupt
- Autocratic - Moderately effective, easy to corrupt
- Democratic - Ineffective, hard to corrupt
- Monarchic - Moderately effective, moderately easy to corrupt
- Oligarchic - Moderate effective, moderately easy to corrupt
- Pejorative - Effective, easy to corrupt
- Other (Republic only) - Moderately effective, moderately hard to corrupt
So, personally, as should be able to be seen from the above, I personally think Aristarchic systems are the best. Here's a brief description of each one:
- Aristocracy - Rule by the "best" people (i.e., the ones most fit to do the job)
- Geniocracy - Rule by the intelligent
- Kratocracy - Rule by the strong (used in less-developed countries, and also by wild animals)
- Meritocracy - Rule by the meritorious (i.e., the ones with the best abilities, knowledge, or contributions)
- Technocracy - Rule by the educated (i.e., doctors, engineers, scientists, professionals, etc.)
Out of the above, it's obvious that Kratocracy seems out of place. For the rest of this spiel, I'm getting rid of it.
Basically, what these do is replace Politicians by people with legitimate reason to be the governing body: because they actually have the skills needed to do the job.
You should also be able to tell that most of them overlap. In general, you can simply call it a "Aristocracy" and it means all of them (except the Kratocracy one, which I said earlier is out of place).
However, it can be seen that it might be rather easy to corrupt, if that group of people get together and decide that they want to change things. However, that is from a perspective of a politician.
If someone has been trained to become an engineer, and in an Aristocracy ends up being the lucky person to be able to make a decision, what do you think they'll do? They'd obvious try to not make a fool of themselves and choose the best option, since otherwise they'd immediately be replaced by one of the many other engineers.
That's one of the biggest advantages to these systems. They are able to maintain efficiency through competition between the participants.
Okay, so with that part done, let's get back to the actual question:
why is democracy inefficient? I originally made this claim in that other thread, and I also said it again earlier in this post.
A democracy (well, representative democracy) is inefficient because it has too many people involved in the decision-making. They do this to make corruption less likely (i.e., checks and balances), which is good, but it ends up slowing down everything, and makes the government a bit less effective at it's job.
One feature of democracies is that they give power to the people. This is another part that makes it more difficult for it to become corrupt. However, the people themselves are corrupt, and thus cause issues. The people only care about themselves, and therefore will not make good decisions about the country, so this ends up making things even less efficient, and also causes division within the country between political parties on issues.
Hope that explains why it's inefficient!
So yeah, that's my basic spiel on the subject. Keep in mind it might be slightly idealistic, but I believe Aristocracies would work out better in the long run.
I hope that all made sense as I explained it. If I jumped around or forgot to include some detail which ends up making it confusing, let me know and I'll clarify what I meant.
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