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It must be really frustrating be on the receiving end of sanctions. The ugly truth about sanctions is that they punish the people more than the aristocracy. But

It must be really frustrating be on the receiving end of sanctions. The ugly truth about sanctions is that they punish the people more than the aristocracy. But they're still better than wars.

barrenko 1y ago
The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.
- typpilol 1y ago
  Cold hard truth. If Iranians don't support their government like is always said.. then....
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  It’s a stupid idea that does not work. People don’t do that because of sanctions.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- totetsu 1y ago
  So like .. ‘I%’ Then?
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership This works about a third of the time [1]. What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it. (On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].) [1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/content/0/Gary%20Clyde%20Hufbauer%2C%20Jeffrey%20J.%20Schott%2C%20Kimberly%20Ann%20Elliott%2C%20Barbara%20Oegg-Economic%20Sanctions%20Reconsidered%20%282008%29.pdf https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159 [2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-tool?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...
  - mirzap 1y ago
    Sanctions don't work. Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions, but because of a very long civil war and, more importantly, a sudden imbalance in external forces (Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine). I don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never. North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Palestine, and much of Africa are examples. Wars and revolutions change regimes. I would even argue that sanctions help regimes stay in power. When an external force imposes a threat (sanctions) on people, those people don't see the outside as "saviours" but as an enemy. They often resent the country that imposed the sanctions more than their own government, and they have no desire to fight an external enemy on behalf of a domestic dictator. Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      You’re refuting a fairly robust study with vibes. > Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions Nobody said it did. > don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics. Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.
      - mirzap 1y ago
        No. I wouldn't. Because it makes it easier for the stronger power to dominate without hot wars. Sanctions cost the U.S. very little when used against Iran, but for Iranians they are extremely hard and disproportionately expensive. A hot war would be far more costly for the U.S., and the higher the expected cost, the less likely policymakers are to choose it.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
- fsloth 1y ago
  ”The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.” Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives. I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable. ”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.” Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best. Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.
- sssilver 1y ago
  Is the concept here that a government, which may not be oppressive enough to spark a domestic uprising (and might even be broadly accepted by the majority of its own citizens due to common moral values or other merits), should be destabilized by external forces to provoke discontent and shift blame onto the government?
- cyberax 1y ago
  > The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions. Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.
- preisschild 1y ago
  It also makes it harder to build weapons for example. Ruzzians for example rely on western chips and other parts for their weapon systems and due to the sanctions they need to smuggle those parts, which makes it more expansive for them.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    Designed in "the West" produced in the ally China.
- Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
  > The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. That's the theory, but has it ever worked? That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > has it ever worked? Yes. About a third of the time [1]. [1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/content/0/Gary%20Clyde%20Hufbauer%2C%20Jeffrey%20J.%20Schott%2C%20Kimberly%20Ann%20Elliott%2C%20Barbara%20Oegg-Economic%20Sanctions%20Reconsidered%20%282008%29.pdf https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159
    - Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
      That's interesting, but (at least from a quick look and a few text searches) they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is. How are they sure that the cases where they "worked" are not regression to the mean (some authoritarian regimes just fall from time to time)? And how are they sure that there is not an equal number of cases where they do the opposite of what they intend? (maybe the Castrist regime would have fallen already if the country had been allowed to develop without sanctions).
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is “The success score is an index on a scale of 1 to 16, found by multiplying the policy result index by the sanctions contribution index” (page 77). Simpler: Table 4A.1 shows their scoring for individual cases. They break at 9 for success versus failure, so maybe eyeball those to see if they gel with your intuition. If not, adjust and re-run the numbers. My eyeballing suggests it would be quite difficult to zero out the list.
- hks0 1y ago
  No country should generally decide something for people of another country, but let's say it's a exceptional case and it's a war tactic, as a response to an external threat. Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all. I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
  - hks0 1y ago
    Correction: half a century.
- don_esteban 1y ago
  "The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership." No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works. The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy. The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.) It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_evolutionary_psychology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
  - ivan_gammel 1y ago
    Swift wasn’t blocked. There were targeted sanctions against certain banks.
    - don_esteban 1y ago
      This seems like legalistic perspective. What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks? Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.
      - ivan_gammel 1y ago
        Jain, as Germans say. It is not impossible to transfer the money (e.g. if you by a chance have accounts in certain banks on either side). Russian foreign trade still exists, Russian tourists still buy tours and spend money abroad etc. It’s even more complicated picture, of course.
- XorNot 1y ago
  No it's also just to deny those countries resources to come after the rest of us. We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available. Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
- t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
  I suspect a reason for sanctions is that it allows the government applying them to look like they're doing something to their voters. It's an effective way of scoring points without spending any resources. They know they're ineffective, but they also know the general public doesn't know that. For instance the EU very publicly applying sanctions against Russia while with less fanfare continuing to give them billions for gas.
- yawpitch 1y ago
  > And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people. Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  Telling people to throw their lives away to provoke a civil war is one of the nastiest rhetorical tricks you hear when people talk about oppressive regimes. In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.
  - dvdkon 1y ago
    It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries. Granted, they had to wait until the Soviet Union was weak to break away, but couldn't sanctions be one of the tools to get there faster?
    - constantcrying 1y ago
      >It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries. And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally. You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing. My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.
    - sjapkee 1y ago
      Ask Balkans about their 90s. "Worked pretty well", yeah.
      - dvdkon 1y ago
        I did say "most", and I stand by that. Look at most of Central Europe, the Baltics, Ukraine... Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).
- sjapkee 1y ago
  >The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  > The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?
palmfacehn 1y ago
From the article: >I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages: >>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians. > I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge. Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time." Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.
- adastra22 1y ago
  Countries with "Democratic" and "Republic" in their name rarely are.
  - vasco 1y ago
    The majority (like over 100) of world countries have Republic in their name.
  - tgma 1y ago
    Or rather if you start aiming for democracy (the actual definition, not the 200 co-opted bastardized definitions,) that's where you always end up, as people from Plato to American founding fathers clearly understood.
- vasco 1y ago
  Only way to widthraw consent in a democracy is moving to pay your taxes somewhere else.

It must be really frustrating be on the receiving end of sanctions. The ugly truth about sanctions is that they punish the people more than the aristocracy. But they're still better than wars.

barrenko 1y ago

The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.

typpilol 1y ago
Cold hard truth. If Iranians don't support their government like is always said.. then....
ivan_gammel 1y ago
It’s a stupid idea that does not work. People don’t do that because of sanctions.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
totetsu 1y ago
So like .. ‘I%’ Then?
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
> point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership This works about a third of the time [1]. What does is incentivising domestic policy changes. We saw that with the nuclear deal. But then Trump blew it up because Obama did it. (On another level, sanctions degrade capability. If there is no room for peace, at least you can limit your adversary’s economy and thus martial production. If regime change randomly happens, you can use lifting sanctions to blow oxygen on the new government’s flame [2].) [1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/content/0/Gary%20Clyde%20Hufbauer%2C%20Jeffrey%20J.%20Schott%2C%20Kimberly%20Ann%20Elliott%2C%20Barbara%20Oegg-Economic%20Sanctions%20Reconsidered%20%282008%29.pdf https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1, page 159 [2] https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-tool?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true https://the307.substack.com/p/how-sanctions-function-as-a-to...
- mirzap 1y ago
  Sanctions don't work. Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions, but because of a very long civil war and, more importantly, a sudden imbalance in external forces (Russia was preoccupied with Ukraine). I don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never. North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Palestine, and much of Africa are examples. Wars and revolutions change regimes. I would even argue that sanctions help regimes stay in power. When an external force imposes a threat (sanctions) on people, those people don't see the outside as "saviours" but as an enemy. They often resent the country that imposed the sanctions more than their own government, and they have no desire to fight an external enemy on behalf of a domestic dictator. Sanctions punish ordinary people, many of whom are already suffering under the regime. So they end up opposing both an internal and an external enemy. In the long run, sanctions probably destroy and cost far more lives than wars. It's a sadistic way to try to crush an enemy.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    You’re refuting a fairly robust study with vibes. > Syria didn't collapse because of sanctions Nobody said it did. > don't think there has ever been a case where a country, or its people, changed the regime because of sanctions. Never Literally a source with a page number, and, in a neighbouring comment, a table with the specifics. Like, if you had a button that could convert the world’s hot wars into mutual embargoes, would you not push it? Up the stakes: mutual embargo plus embargoed by their leading trade partner.
    - mirzap 1y ago
      No. I wouldn't. Because it makes it easier for the stronger power to dominate without hot wars. Sanctions cost the U.S. very little when used against Iran, but for Iranians they are extremely hard and disproportionately expensive. A hot war would be far more costly for the U.S., and the higher the expected cost, the less likely policymakers are to choose it.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
fsloth 1y ago
”The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership.” Very easy to say. Quite hard to pull off. People in authoritarian countries have very little leverage and would like just to live fullfilling lives. I’m not saying ”don’t do sanctions” but this mechanistic outcome is highly improbable. ”perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people.” Um - the most polite way of stating this is that this view of how political systems work is highly delusional at best. Ruling party depends on _elite_ _compliance_.
sssilver 1y ago
Is the concept here that a government, which may not be oppressive enough to spark a domestic uprising (and might even be broadly accepted by the majority of its own citizens due to common moral values or other merits), should be destabilized by external forces to provoke discontent and shift blame onto the government?
cyberax 1y ago
> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. Iranians had several mass uprisings that were suppressed by the military. And the top military and religious authorities in Iran have no problems whatsoever living well, even with all the sanctions. Just like the Russian elites, btw. They can't visit France as easily anymore, but there's always Dubai available. That can't care less where your money comes from.
preisschild 1y ago
It also makes it harder to build weapons for example. Ruzzians for example rely on western chips and other parts for their weapon systems and due to the sanctions they need to smuggle those parts, which makes it more expansive for them.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Designed in "the West" produced in the ally China.
Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. That's the theory, but has it ever worked? That something that never works (not even in cases where it has been going on for multiple generations, as in the case of Cuba or Iran) keeps being tried makes it impossible to believe that the intention is making it "work" in the sense you mean. The sanctions are just to sink those countries for political interest. Which in some cases makes sense (e.g. Russia, as it's invading Ukraine and sinking its economy can be a deterrent in that respect), but in others is definitely evil.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > has it ever worked? Yes. About a third of the time [1]. [1] https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/content/0/Gary%20Clyde%20Hufbauer%2C%20Jeffrey%20J.%20Schott%2C%20Kimberly%20Ann%20Elliott%2C%20Barbara%20Oegg-Economic%20Sanctions%20Reconsidered%20%282008%29.pdf https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/863435/mod_resource/conte... Table 6.1 page 159
  - Al-Khwarizmi 1y ago
    That's interesting, but (at least from a quick look and a few text searches) they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is. How are they sure that the cases where they "worked" are not regression to the mean (some authoritarian regimes just fall from time to time)? And how are they sure that there is not an equal number of cases where they do the opposite of what they intend? (maybe the Castrist regime would have fallen already if the country had been allowed to develop without sanctions).
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > they don't seem to explain what their "sanction contribution score" is “The success score is an index on a scale of 1 to 16, found by multiplying the policy result index by the sanctions contribution index” (page 77). Simpler: Table 4A.1 shows their scoring for individual cases. They break at 9 for success versus failure, so maybe eyeball those to see if they gel with your intuition. If not, adjust and re-run the numbers. My eyeballing suggests it would be quite difficult to zero out the list.
hks0 1y ago
No country should generally decide something for people of another country, but let's say it's a exceptional case and it's a war tactic, as a response to an external threat. Then half a decade shows that point is not relevant or, the overthrowing is not the point at all. I too wished the wolrd was that simple. But there are dictatorships, who kill, slaughter, coerce, ... and also all the international affairs from which those people are kept an outsider with zero say by the said government. I don't think we can reduce it to "it's people's fault".
- hks0 1y ago
  Correction: half a century.
don_esteban 1y ago
"The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership." No, that's for consumption by population of the sanctioning country. The people in the know know very well that that never works. The point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA. Classic mafia strategy. The exception were the sanctions on Russia at the start of the Ukraine war. Those were unprecedented (including the freezing of the national bank assets and blocking of Swift) and it looks like the western powers really believed that those sanctions will cause economic collapse and regime change in Russia.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > point is for every other country in the world to see how much it hurts if you don't follow the wishes of USA This is the symbolic value of sanctions. It’s a part of coalition building and domestic messaging. (Though if you constantly do it this becomes less effective.) It’s a classic team-building strategy: costly signalling [1]. You see it in mafias, but like, also when a softball team buys matching jerseys. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_evolutionary_psychology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costly_signaling_theory_in_e...
- ivan_gammel 1y ago
  Swift wasn’t blocked. There were targeted sanctions against certain banks.
  - don_esteban 1y ago
    This seems like legalistic perspective. What percentage of Russia's foreign transactions went through those banks? Certainly, normal people can't normally transfer money to/from Russia. The same for almost all companies.
    - ivan_gammel 1y ago
      Jain, as Germans say. It is not impossible to transfer the money (e.g. if you by a chance have accounts in certain banks on either side). Russian foreign trade still exists, Russian tourists still buy tours and spend money abroad etc. It’s even more complicated picture, of course.
XorNot 1y ago
No it's also just to deny those countries resources to come after the rest of us. We don't sell them weapons, and we try to limit dual-use technology from being freely available. Defense tech uses a lot of open source software and commercially available software - letting a regime simply buy technological advantage it can't cultivate is a good way to lose that advantage and then also lose the culture which can create it.
t1E9mE7JTRjf 1y ago
I suspect a reason for sanctions is that it allows the government applying them to look like they're doing something to their voters. It's an effective way of scoring points without spending any resources. They know they're ineffective, but they also know the general public doesn't know that. For instance the EU very publicly applying sanctions against Russia while with less fanfare continuing to give them billions for gas.
yawpitch 1y ago
> And if your're someone sliding into nasty leadership / government situation you have to realize there will be a consequence to that and that the perception of the ruling party can never be separated from the perception of the people. Especially if you’ve just been dumb enough to re-elect that nasty leadership / government on behalf of (and at the behest of) the people who benefit off having that ruling party in office.
constantcrying 1y ago
Telling people to throw their lives away to provoke a civil war is one of the nastiest rhetorical tricks you hear when people talk about oppressive regimes. In basically every case a bad government is preferable to the destruction, chaos and death a civil war brings. "Just overthrow your government" is ridiculous plea.
- dvdkon 1y ago
  It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries. Granted, they had to wait until the Soviet Union was weak to break away, but couldn't sanctions be one of the tools to get there faster?
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    >It worked pretty well for most east bloc countries. And for some it worked out pretty badly. Hungarians rebeled against communism, but that rebellion was put down brutally. You are correct that towards the end of the Soviet Union many of the client states and Russia itself had popular uprisings which succeeded, but that that point the Communist Government was already failing. My point is not that no popular uprising has ever worked or that outside pressure can not force the end of some regime, but that telling people that they need to take up arms against their government is an insane proposition.
  - sjapkee 1y ago
    Ask Balkans about their 90s. "Worked pretty well", yeah.
    - dvdkon 1y ago
      I did say "most", and I stand by that. Look at most of Central Europe, the Baltics, Ukraine... Even the Asian parts of the USSR mostly had peaceful transitions into independence (and often into the hands of new semi-dictators, but that's beside the point).
sjapkee 1y ago
>The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. Yeah, it will certainly make life better, works every time (no).
marcosdumay 1y ago
> The point is to get people in those contries to overthrow their leadership. After the CIA and the US foreign policy had so much trouble overthrowing the old one and putting that one in place?

palmfacehn 1y ago

From the article: >I read hackernews on a daily basis and I visit lots of different websites regularly. I am almost always on my VPN as I am internally firewalled by the government and externally shooed because of the sanctions, so I am probably missing some of these heart-warming messages: >>Iranian IPs are blocked here, due to your decision to arm Russia with drones so that they can indiscriminately massacre civilians. > I actually do not blame the people who do this. I think there is a fundamental misconception that people think because "Islamic Republic" has the word "Republic" in it, it must be a government of people in charge. Total war and total information war are the side effects of the Democracy meme. Everyone from a taxi driver to a professor is assumed to be a political actor. The rationale runs something like this, "because you have a vote, you are defacto responsible for the actions of your state and political classes. Vote harder next time." Meanwhile the individuals involved never explicitly consented to be governed. Even if there were a meaningful democratic process, it doesn't follow that the individual could withdraw consent. Ironically one of the suggested avenues for withdrawing consent in a democracy is to refuse to vote.

adastra22 1y ago
Countries with "Democratic" and "Republic" in their name rarely are.
- vasco 1y ago
  The majority (like over 100) of world countries have Republic in their name.
- tgma 1y ago
  Or rather if you start aiming for democracy (the actual definition, not the 200 co-opted bastardized definitions,) that's where you always end up, as people from Plato to American founding fathers clearly understood.
vasco 1y ago
Only way to widthraw consent in a democracy is moving to pay your taxes somewhere else.