Summary

Best Path to Development: • Acceptable and Useful: One of our main points in this debate is that concentrating power in one person or a small clique is a widely accepted way in modern societies to solve problems and crisis and how for developing nations not being developed is a crisis that justifies doing exactly the same thing, through a dictatorship, so they can benefit from the swift and efficient decision making that it enables. The opposition chose to deal with this utilitarian argument by resorting to Ad Hitlerum and dismissing it as just propaganda, and even stating that "false decisions" would have no "safety net", when in reality, in times of trouble, accidents and mistakes, dictatorship IS a safety net in itself, and for democracies, institutionalized in the mechanisms mentioned before. • Able and Willing: The opposition conceded to us "The evidence shows that dictatorship can gives better control to the variables" which includes determining the allocation of resources and defining the specifications, for services such as health care and education to improve the quality of life of the citizens or to spread the values needed to modernize; but they doubted that this power would be used appropriately. However, when the discussion centered around incentives, the opposition claimed that the dictator had strong incentives to stay in power, but since we explained how to stay in power a dictator must balance predation and repression, and yield enough results, and seek the best advisors available, since it is in its best interest to keep a functioning system. • Flexibility and Timely:And since the dictators need not consult other bodies, or go through lengthy legislative or bureaucratic processes, they can take decisions in a timely manner, without the need to create political will, compromise due to political alliances, or postpone it for electoral reasons. On the point of political freedoms, we consider that these may account as desirable features in a society, but they are not part of the concept of development, and they have the potential to undermine sustainable development (in terms of health, education, income and security) through the improper incentives raised by the democratic decision making mechanisms and institutions. This is specially true when the lack of development reaches such a low level that people is incapable of administering any political liberties in a productive fashion. We've seen evidence of this in the examples of Venezuela, Yugoslavia, the USSR and other cases commented throughout the debate. Apart from this, both teams have agreed that it is economic and social development what leads to democratic demands from the citizens. This is so because it is when people have their basic needs well more than solved that they may start valuing the increase of political freedoms over further increases in development. In this context, democracy advocates should understand that the swiftest path to development (a prerequisite for a sustainable liberal democracy) is a dictatorship. Our concerns about a popularity based system, that has incentives to yield results in between elections, to postpone unpopular yet necessary elections were only met with abstract appeals to check and balances, they both said that their unconcrete proposal would work just for having check and balances, and that ours wouldn't, partly for lacking them. The thing is, separation of powers is not a prerequisite to democracy, as parliamentary systems under the "Fusion of Powers" paradigm can attest. Thus we have provided a system that is acceptable and useful to overcome difficulties, is willing and able achieve development, and is flexible and timely for doing so vs a system that can not properly function in a society not fully developed, and that hinders development, if judged on whether dictatorship has been proven to be the best path for development, the proposition team wins. • Consistency and Definitions: One of the most important aspects of the debate is making the appropriate definitions and being consistent with them. On this count we contend that we defined dictatorship in a clear and constructive way from the beginning, using the definition: "A form of government in which absolute power is concentrated in a dictator or a small clique", we also explained, one by one, how each of our examples complied with our definition, when the opposition team felt the need to challenge our definition. However, the opposition team defined dictatorship in a extremely narrow and nonconstructive way, as we stated in our response to their first argument, stating that "A Dictatorship is a form of government in which the ruler is an absolute dictator (not restricted by a constitution or laws or opposition etc.)". But we were further appalled upon reading the arguments the opposition team during their second speech, since not one the examples of dictatorships they provided out of their own free will and initiative (that is, without the proposition first presenting that example) met their own definition. When in argument no.4 they affirm that "This is the then same problem faced by dictatorship country such as Cuba, North Korea, Burma, and Libya", we realized that since Cuba, North Korea are one party systems under the Cuban Communist Party and the Korean Worker's Party, respectively, they do not fit their definition since there's not just a single person in charge, but rather a group (party), Burma doesn't either as it is run by a Military Junta known as the State Peace and Development Council, composed by 9 members (and not AN absolute dictator), and since they also establish that the dictator is not restricted by laws, constitution or opposition, then Gaddafi doesn't count either since he could not approve a measure on his own; then in argument no.5 they say "Or as some dictators comes to prove; changing the constitution to extend their term in office up to 2030" referring to the election where the abolition of terms limits in Venezuela was approved by the people, but if the dictator is "not restricted by a constitution" why would Chavez need the Venezuelan people to amend it? clearly because he IS bound to the constitution in order to stay in office, thus not qualifying under their definition either, and then they also attempted to peg Zimbabwe as a dictatorship, even though a regime where the opposition party can gain a majority in parliament is definitely restricted by the opposition, thus not qualifying under their definition. Not happy with this, they continued to further cripple their definition when they asserted that "the (so-called) dictator amputates its authoritative power and giving it to the market", thus further restricting "real" dictators only to market-hostile dictatorships, it could certainly be inferred that since their definition didn't even work for their examples, having a useful definition of dictatorship for the debate was not one of their priorities. On top of this, the opposition performed a highly inconsistent classification of regimes, taking the big happy family of one party Communist regimes: Cuba, China, North Korea and the USSR, and splitting it between different foster homes, China to a non-dictatorial home, Cuba and North Korea to a dictatorial one, and the USSR seems to be unaccounted for, what is supposed to be the big difference between these single party, originally Marxist-Leninist, communist countries with regimes kick started by revolutions? They never explained that. And then, they put together the current authoritarian government of Venezuela, just recently taking its first steps into a de facto one party system, with the multi-party Zimbabwe, as dictatorships, but then fiercely -yet unsuccessfully- attempted to mis-characterize a country that has long been a de facto one-party system with "Singapore is popular as a democratic country who implement repressive action". Since the Proposition clearly put forth the most constructive definitions in the debate, and was able to uphold them throughout, and also had a consistent way to categorize the relevant examples for the debate, if judged on the quality of the definitions and on consistency, the proposition wins this debate. • Uniqueness of Dictatorships: One of the main themes of the debate is whether Dictatorships' ability to better control the variables of development (as conceded by the opposition when they agreed "dictatorship can gives better control to the variables") translates into better performance. There are two clear examples we provided, that the opposition failed to refute, and even conceded. Combining both examples we get that given the same ethnic, temporal, geographic, cultural, historical, linguistic, political, economic and religious background, dictatorship yields better results than democracy. First is Cuba, we first introduced this example in argument yes.3 , stating how this Latin American nation had a health system that rivaled with those of developed nations, and we also quoted how Cuba sends education advisers to other developing nations to aid them, being ahead of its Latin American neighbors. Both counts were conceded by the opposition in as "a good example of human development in Cuba currently", but the true importance of this example is that we they never even attempted to refute that what separates Cuba from its very similar Latin American brothers is the fact that they have not turned to democracy, thus making dictatorship the defining characteristic. On the other hand, for economic and political background, we relied in the comparison between PR China and India, and between PR China and the USSR. We argued that being two neighboring states, comparable both in age and in population size, differentiated only in that China turned to a one party system, and India to a multi party democracy; China had a more promising future on the base that they had a better bureaucracy, better state institutions and state services than India, who only had a better private sector, but that strengthening its private sector would be easier for China than it would be for India to build a proper public sector. The opposition decided to not only not refute our argument, but to strengthen it by establishing that both nations were also comparable in that they both started with Leninist economies (thus being even more comparable/similar), and that China implemented the needed economic reforms before India did, and also that India implemented them almost too late ("This socialist economic policies that is adopted in Nehru-Gandhi era that virtually bankrupted India by 1991"); this strongly supports our thesis that dictatorships make needed decisions in a more swiftly and timely manner than democracies. As for the comparison with the Soviet Union, in which we established that for a given dictatorship in crisis it was better to liberalize the economy than to democratize, seeing as how China had a better growth rate than its neighbor, and also how its neighbor collapsed and dissolved, unable to; the opposition did not refute this. Thus the proposition team clearly proved that dictatorships do have an advantage over democracies in securing and maintaining development, and if judged under this criteria the proposition should win.