I don't think any human being has a will strong enough to resist such money, including myself. When you have the opportunity to become rich beyond imagination by screwing people, you will, sooner or later.
That's a pretty bold statement to make. I can't be stuffed looking it up, but i'm willing to wager there have been quite a number of benevolent leaders throughout history. Moreover, it's actually pretty arrogant to imply you have a bead on the moral stature of over 6 billion other people.
You may turn into a greedy douchebag in that situation, but that doesn't mean everyone would. And truly, there is no greater government than one led by a benevolent dictator.
And there is no greater economic system then wealth falling out of the sky, and no greater car than one that goes 0-60 in two seconds and gets 400 miles to the gallon.
Look around you. The world is
packed with greedy douchebags scrambling to grab and enlarge the tiny amounts of wealth and power they currently possess. Who would pick the dictator, and how? What could you do if you ended up with a bad one? How would you protect your rights from being crushed by him?
The United States was unrivalled at the end of the 18th century world for having the right to openly criticize the government and demonstrate against it. The United States was also unrivalled for not having an autocracy (except for France, which ended up with one shortly thereafter). It is human nature for people to abuse whatever power they get, so the guiding principle of democracy is to limit abuse by distributing power widely.
Yes. Let's. I see no good reason why the executive should have the power to trump the judicial branch. It makes a mockery of the entire system if presidents can pardon each other for any crimes they are found guilty of committing. It fosters the creation of an old boys network where any president knows that he can do whatever the **** he likes no matter how illegal safe in the knowledge that the next president will pardon him in order to get the same treatment when he loses power.
But the simple fact is that I didn't actually say anything about sending the people who pardoned him to prison. I said he should be in prison. We're talking about a man who bombed beaches in order to prevent tourism to Cuba. A tactic which the US decries when it happens in Egypt but ignores when it happens in Cuba.
The power of the president to give pardons is protected under Article II, section 2. I'm not really saying that not extraditing him wasn't
wrong, I'm saying that it was not illegal, and that it's not the same as the CIA sending an operative under orders to assassinate Fidel Castro. And to my knowledge, Richard Nixon is the only president who has ever been pardoned, and Gerald Ford committed political suicide in doing so. The pardon was most likely an act of
realpolitik to antagonize Hugo Chavez. Realpolitik is one of those unfortunate realities we have to live with in international affairs.
