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Jerry Feldman wrote: | We come down to the difference between political structures. | Dictatorships can be much more efficient. "Mussolini made the trains | run on time" in Italy. Democratic societies are much less efficiant, | but we all have a lot of choices.=20 Actually, historians have thoroughly debunked the "Mussolini made the trains run on time" myth. During his tenure, the Italians trains had an atrociously bad on-time record. And, more generally, they've shown that dictatorships (including those in corporations) tend to be rather inefficient. The main reason is that the decision makers rarely understand (or care about) the low-level issues, and the people who do are afraid to speak up or take actions to improve problem situations. If you want efficiency, you give the people with expertise the power to make and implement their own decisions, and the power structure must support those decisions. This tends to happen automatically in democracies and other decentralized systems, which is why they are usually more efficient. We even have a special case of this within the linux community, with the Gentoo and Slackware distros generally producing somewhat more efficient systems than the others. The reasons are fairly obvious and well known: It takes a bit of expertise and labor to install those distros. And the efficiency gains are small enough that it can be worthwhile to save human time by just going with one of the more packaged distros. This goes along with the frequent observation that it takes work to maintain a democratic political system. -- Key: 09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.
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