Nassim Taleb on Saudi Arabia, from pages 106-107 of his book, Antifragility:
“So a place “allied” to the United States is a total monarchy, devoid of a constitution. But that is not what is morally shocking. A group of between seven and fifteen thousand members of the royal family runs the place, leading a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle in open contradiction with the purist ideas that got them there. Look at the contradiction: the stern desert tribes whose legitimacy is derived from Amish-like austerity can, thanks to a superpower, turn to hedonistic uninhibited pleasure-seeking: the king openly travels for pleasure with a retinue that fills four Jumbo jets. Quite a departure from his ancestors. The family members amassed a fortune now largely in Western safes. Without the United States, the country would have had its revolution, a regional breakup, some turmoil, then perhaps–by now–some stability. But preventing noise makes the problem worse in the long run.”
He may be stretching his analogies a bit too thin in places, generalizing them so as to apply them to a greater number of circumstances, but Taleb does point out the phenomenon of foreign aid creating political corruption in governments. A government is loyal to whoever writes the checks and delivers the guns. For a government to be somewhat accountable, both of those must come from the people they govern. It’s one reason I’ve always found the “tax the rich” policy argument strange: forcing the rich to pay the government more would serve only to more closely tie the rich to the government.
