Is this what Bryan Caplan meant?

Posted by Marc Hodak on January 1, 2008 under Invisible trade-offs | Comments are off for this article

I saw this in the WSJ:

Kremlin officials argue that Russian voters are still too tainted by decades of communist rule to be relied on to make responsible choices in the voting booth. “We’re a very leftist country that’s not the least bit concerned with obeying the law,” said one.

At the meeting with foreign analysts in September, Mr. Putin said Russia would need “strong presidential power” for years to come. Parliamentary democracy — of the type tried in the early 1990s — would be “very dangerous” for Russia, he said, for at least another decade.

And it reminded me of this:

The heretical thought that rarely surfaces is that weakening democracy in favor of markets could be a good thing. No matter what you believe about how well markets work in absolute terms, if democracy starts to look worse, markets start to look better by comparison.

Here is another, practical take on democracy.