Even in a democracy, there is always
highly influential individuals who are key supporters and whom you must have on your side,
because it is their money, or their influence, or their favors that keeps you in power.
You cannot promise to give them a share of the treasure directly,
like a dictator would do, but you can create legislative loopholes for their investments,
passing laws they wrote or giving them "You're out of jail" cards for their mistakes.
Don't leave them a wheelbarrowful of gold on their doorstep, but sign contracts for their businesses.
You, as a leader, have roads to build, computers to maintain,
or buildings to be rebuilt. No one leads alone, after all.
Or you can do the moral thing and ignore the big keys,
but you will find yourself fighting against those who take them into account.
Good luck.
Corruption is not just a minor crime, but rather a tool of power,
whether in democracy or dictatorship.
But, we'll talk about that again next time.
So accept favors, influence key blocks and you will gain power,
lead by doing actions that seem contradictory and stupid to those who do not understand the rules of the game,
like discreetly helping a powerful industry that you have publicly denounced,
or pass laws that harm a bloc that voted for you.
Your job is not to have understandable and consistent leadership ethics,
but to balance the interests of your keys to power, both small and large.
This is how to stay in office.
With this headache caused by your role as a representative, you may ask yourself, looking at rule #3,
why can't you dispense with influencing blocks and buying favors
and instead bribe the army to take power?
It is finally time to focus on taxes and revolts.
You must understand rule #2 and how the treasure is raised
and used to ensure the functioning of a country.
If we represent on a graph the tax rate of a country according to the number of keys its leader needs,
A correlation is highlighted.
More democracy = less taxes.
If you are comfortably ensconced in a democracy, you may sneer at this,
but your fellow citizens who don't earn enough don't pay income tax
and are entitled to rebates, which reduces the tax rate on average.
In a dictatorship, it doesn't happen like that.
Dictatorships often bypass the administrative paperwork of taxes by directly seizing wealth.
It is not uncommon to see a dictator forcing farmers to sell their products to him at a lower cost.
so that he himself can sell them on the open market and pocket the price difference,
which is an incredibly high equivalent tax rate.
Thus, taxes in democracies are low compared to dictatorships,
but why do the representatives reduce their share of the treasure?
Well, reducing taxes helps please the masses,
dictators do not need to please the masses and can therefore tax their poor citizens more heavily,
to be able to pay key supporters.
But representatives, in a democracy, can take a smaller part
from the wealth of each of their citizens to pay their key supporters,
because their citizens, more free and educated, are more productive than peasants.
In a democracy, the more productivity there is, the better off the leaders are,
that's why they build universities, hospitals, roads and grant freedoms:
not just out of pure benevolence,
but because it increases the productivity of citizens,
which swells the treasury that accrues to the leader and key supporters,
even if the tax rate is lower.
It is better to live in a democracy than in a dictatorship,
not because the representatives are better people,
but because it turns out that their needs are shared by a majority of the population.
The things that make citizens more productive are also the things that make their lives better,
the representatives want everyone to be productive, so it's freeways for everyone.
The worst dictators are those whose motivations are shared only by a minority,
those who have the fewest keys to power,
and this explains why the worst dictatorships all have something in common:
they own gold, oil, diamonds and the like.
If a nation's wealth is obtained primarily by digging into the ground,
it is a nation where life is terribly difficult,
for a gold mine, even if it teems with dying slaves,
can still produce significant wealth.
It's more complicated with oil, but luckily, foreign companies
can extract and refine it without any intervention from citizens.
Since citizens are outside of this cycle, they can be ignored,
the leader is rewarded and the loyalty of the keys to power is preserved.
We therefore live in a world where the best and most cultured democracies
are stable, where the worst and richest dictatorships are stable,
and in the middle is a valley of revolutions.
Resource-rich dictators only build roads from their port to their resources,
and from their palace to the airport.
And the people say nothing, not because "everything is fine", or even because they are afraid,
but because the hard truth is that
starving and completely disorganized illiterates do not make good revolutionaries.
Furthermore, an average dictator with few resources must, as mentioned previously,
directly seize a large part of the wealth of its poor farmers and workers.
Thus, two roads are not enough and it must maintain a minimum quality of life for its citizens,
but keep the workforce somewhat interconnected
and somewhat educated and somewhat healthy
makes citizens more likely to revolt.
Understand that the epic image of the people passing through the palace gates and overthrowing the dictator
is mostly just a fantasy. If you are the head of an average dictatorship,
the people storm the palace when the army lets them
only to have them knock you over because you lost control of your keys and are going to be replaced.
This is why after each "popular revolution" in an average dictatorship,
the new leader is often the same as the previous one, if not worse.
The people did not replace the king, it was the court which replaced the king,
using the protests of the people they allowed to express themselves.
A benevolent dictator who wants to cross this valley must build things
which drain the treasury of the keys to power and which make citizens more capable of revolt,
which often leads to the ascension of a new leader
who prefers to hold his keys than cross the valley.
On the other hand, democracies are stable,
not only thanks to the large number of keys and their conflicts of interest
which make dictatorial revolts almost impossible to organize,
but also because such a revolt would destroy the same treasure which it would try to seize:
the productivity of citizens.
Moreover, those who help the would-be dictator in a democracy
know that he will eliminate key supporters once he comes to power.
This is the definition of a coup.
Potential key supporters must compare their odds of surviving the purge and being rewarded
with the risks of finding themselves outside of a democracy that they helped establish.
In a stable democracy, this is a very bad bet to make.
You will eventually become incredibly rich, but you will probably be dead,
and made the lives of everyone you knew terrible.
The math is not in your favor.
Being on the right side of a coup in a dictatorship
guarantees you have the resources so that you and your family can acquire what the peasants do not have:
medical care, education, quality of life...
This is what makes the competition for power so fierce.
But in a democracy, the majority already has access to all of this,
so why take the risk?
Thus, the more the wealth of a nation comes from the productivity of its citizens,
the more power is divided,
and the more the quality of life of these same citizens must be improved by the leader,
and vice versa
But if a stable democracy becomes very poor,
or if a resource more important than the productivity of citizens is discovered,
the chances of winning this bet increase
and the seizure of power by a small group is facilitated.
Because if the current quality of life is pitiful,
or if wealth does not depend on citizens,
coups are worth taking the risk.
These are the main reasons for the fall of a democracy.