{"id":166,"date":"2008-01-01T19:01:23","date_gmt":"2008-01-02T03:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/?p=166"},"modified":"2008-01-01T19:01:23","modified_gmt":"2008-01-02T03:01:23","slug":"is-this-what-bryan-caplan-meant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/is-this-what-bryan-caplan-meant\/","title":{"rendered":"Is this what Bryan Caplan meant?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I saw this <a href=\"http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB119820263246543973.html\">in the WSJ<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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. &#8220;We&#8217;re a very leftist country that&#8217;s not the least bit concerned with obeying the law,&#8221; said one.<\/p>\n<p>At the meeting with foreign analysts in September, Mr. Putin said Russia would need &#8220;strong presidential power&#8221; for years to come. Parliamentary democracy &#8212; of the type tried in the early 1990s &#8212; would be &#8220;very dangerous&#8221; for Russia, he said, for at least another decade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And it reminded me of <a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/chapters\/i8384.html\">this<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here is another, practical take on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spectator.org\/dsp_article.asp?art_id=12502\">democracy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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. &#8220;We&#8217;re a very leftist country that&#8217;s not the least bit concerned with obeying the law,&#8221; said one. At the meeting with foreign [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-invisible-trade-offs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hodakvalue.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}