As you wish…

From a leader’s point of view, the most important function of the people is to pay taxes. A l regimes need money. As a result, certain basic public goods must be made available even by the meanest autocrat, unless he has access to significant revenue from sources, like oil or foreign aid, that are not based on taxing workers. Public benefits like essential infrastructure, education, and health care, need to be readily available to ensure that labor is productive enough to pay taxes to line the pockets of rulers and their essential supporters. These policies are not instituted for the betterment of the masses, even though, of course, some members of the masses, especialy workers, benefit from them. Education, as a means for getting ahead in life, is a big deal for any country’s citizenry. Indeed, a popular refrain among many liberalminded thinkers is to extol the quality of education in otherwise oppressive states like Castro’s Cuba or even Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. And they have a good point. Both Cuba and North Korea have impressive primary education. For instance a 1997 UNESCO study finds that Cuban third and fourth graders far outperform their counterparts in other Latin American countries, As for North Korea, it has a 100 percent literacy rate. In contrast, only 81 percent of democratic India’s people can read and write.2 But these facts can be misleading, or even downright wrong. That basic education is mandatory and extensive in such places often is used to argue that autocracy isn’t so bad. Rarely do any of us stop to probe beneath these observations to find out why dictators pay to have wel-educated third graders—but do not carry that quality of education forward to higher learning. The logic behind political survival teaches us to be suspicious. We cannot help but believe that these public goods are not intended to uplift and assist the people unfortunate enough to live in such places. The rules of politics, as we know, instruct leaders to do no more for the people than is absolutely essential to prevent rebelion. Leaders who spend on public welfare at the expense of their essentials are courting disaster. These leaders, whether dictators or democrats, are al grappling with the same question: How much education is the right amount? For those who rely on few essential backers the answer is straightforward. Educational opportunity should not be so extensive as to equip ordinary folks, the interchangeables, to question government authority. A naïve person might look at any number of awful regimes and yet come to the conclusion that, because they provide such public benefits as nationalized health care or sound primary education, they’re actualy better to their people than many democratic states are to theirs. This is nonsense, of course—in the vast majority of cases autocrats are simply keeping the peasants healthy enough to work and educated enough to do their jobs. Either way, literate or not, they’re sti l peasants and they’re going to stay that way.

-Chapter 5; Public Goods Not for the Public’s Good, The Dictator’s Handbook (Bueno de Mesquita & Smith)