Today, it’s increasingly easy to get disillusioned with democracy, and Americans sometimes envy China’s dictatorship for its ability to decide and implement good policies quickly. There’s no doubt that decisions and their implementation take longer in democracies than in dictatorships, because the essence of democracy is checks, balances, and broad-based (hence time-consuming) decision-making. For instance, China’s adoption of lead-free gasoline took just one year, whereas that policy required a decade of debates and court challenges in the U.S.
