Benevolent Despotism: A style of ruling which involves autocratic authority tempered by moral fiber.
I would imagine that as you read that, you thought "what the...?" To minimize confusion, let us examine the words themselves - after which I will explain why I brought it up.
Benevolent: to be nonthreatening or charitable (or at least considerate).
Despotism: to lead in militantly autocratic fashion, ie. tyranny.
Obviously these two words seem to go together about as naturally as "Chinese" and "strudel," yet there it is before you. Why? I'll tell you...
A coupla months ago I was thinking about the various things wrong in the world today. Specifically, the lack of space exploration and the fact that the average sot has far too much opportunity to voice his uneducated opinion. Don't get me wrong; everybody (obviously) has the right to speak in this country, but I really could happily live the rest of my expectedly long and (hopefully) fruitful life without two factors: (1) accidental death, and (2) a rather large populace of uneducated sots voting their little selfish hearts out so that not only will their kids not be able to walk on Mars some day but by hell they will be able to hate one another, and carry on the tradition of being selfish peasants who don't see more than a month ahead of time (and that's if they're "gifted"), but I get ahead of myself. So, as I was thinking the depressing stuff above I came to the following conclusion:
CAPITALISM IS OUT FUCKING DATED.
Let me elaborate: CAPITALISM IS OUT-FUCKING-DATED, GODDAMMIT. DO YOU FUCKING READ ME?!!?!!?!!? WELL, DO YOU?
Note: If you've never watched STAR TREK, not only will you not understand this reference, but you also suck. As I was typing, it struck me that in Star Trek it's the twenty-third century, and they do not have money within Federated Space. DO YOU KNOW WHY?!? Because Gene Roddenberry (may God rest his soul) realized that at some point a socio-economic structure based off of greed will never accomplish anything serious beyond our solar system. Hell, at this rate we won't leave our planet for another fifty years. Yet, you know, if we were ruled by a Benign Despot, all he (or she) would have to do is say "Hey, you scientists have ten years to build a spacecraft to go to Mars" - and voilá, we would be on Mars. Since money would be impractical, the budget would pose no problem. If the scientists said "bite me," the despot would have them shot, thereby well-motivating the others. By the way, if you doubt the effectiveness of this, just look at the USSR's accomplishments. Note that I do not subscribe to communism - and hell, they weren't exactly benevolent towards their people.
Now if you disagree with me on this, raise your children correctly. Teach them charity, honor, foresight, and a sense of community spirit. I would love to be proven wrong. (And I said proven - not told I'm wrong or argued with, but proven wrong.)