[aiProgMach]

I don't underestimate the importance of having the population (or most of it) has a saying in how their everyday life go (to some extent, e.g I don't think the moral laws can be determined by votes even if all humans voted on them). However, most of the benefits that usually attributed to democracy should be attributed to wealth, colonialism, and transparency/ no internal corruption (and no, democracy might help in reducing corruption and providing more transparency but it's not strictly required). When you look into (once) successful countries such as France, UK.. You can see wealthy and strong nation that win wars and keep overcoming obstacles, and you attribute that to the "democracy" and "liberal values" or simply you can ignore those liberal values and remember that "correlation doesn't imply causation" and then you can better explain things with colonialism and mass destruction of people, and nature to extract value, then it doesn't matter much how efficient you are. The British empire didn't conquer the 1840 famine by being a "democracy", it simply stole Irish people food making the crisis worse for them. Also when you look closely most of the democracies aren't that distributed, in every nation there are power structures that determine what the collective nation do, do you think really that all US people actually took the decision to destroy Vietnam? or fight Communism at any expense? or conquer and destroy Iraq? I don't think the American people are all that evil, the decision is cooked and it's enforced later via "democratic" channels.