It's also worth noting that all of this is a historical anomaly - it's in no way clear that our present technological civilization requires free society to keep the economy going.

Which is to say we need to be clear about our objectives: if free society and individual liberty is important to us, those need to be the goals potentially at the expense of short-term economic growth.

Do you have a source on that? It is easy to underestimate just how _stupidly_ a non-free society can behave. I'm not even talking democracy vs other (there can be non-free democracies, or notionally authoritarian regimes that are quite free in practice), I mean the really basic "if you can work to better yourself, then go for it" style liberty.

The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss.

The core of that mechanism in the west is if you think a companies management are just clueless you can start your own company and compete. That is a big component of what freedom is - if you think you can do it better you can try to do it better.

Non-free societies would almost certainly disrupt that mechanism as the first thing they did. Given how complicated a modern economy is, I'm not sure they'd be competitive with a free society. The inefficiencies would build up to spectacular levels.

> The system of corporations we have today is a super-civilised way of wresting power and control from existing structures - if you can do something better and cheaper than the company currently in power, you can displace them quickly and with minimum fuss.

Which means that the avenues for practical freedoms are somewhat limited outside of the corporate/mercantile paths.

Genuine question - how does China fit into this narrative?

Well China is building up its inefficiencies even as it makes other advances. They created quite a few time bombs for themselves.

1. They have set themselves up massive health time-bombs with their pollution and ineffective regulations. Not to mention prevalence of smoking. 2. China's Social Credit plan is creating a turn-key rebellion as the newly created lower caste has nothing to lose but their chains and the high social credit scores means they have a purge list for when bloody repression begets bloody revolution. 3. They have enough people laundering money for 'emergency escape hatches for when they fall out of favor' that they are blowing up real estate prices internationally in major cities. Optimistically it could just be fallacious beliefs that real estate is a foolproof investment but that doesn't make things much better. 4. The party leadership flat out know that they cannot survive a recession and try to prop things up constantly.

They may be the most viable example but they are still vulnerable to collapses - not a guarantee by any means but there is definite precedent.

In a sense, what is happening in China is unknowable. Their reported statistics are probably not so trustworthy and more governed by their political realities than their physical realities. I know that their country has the word "Communist" in the name and not much more.

How free are they? How do I compare that to another country? How much of my view is tinted by not speaking Chinese? I dunno. As a statement of principle, there is no evidence that the top-down economy nut has been cracked, so if they are trying to do that it will fall apart in messy fashion at some point. You can't take your best and brightest, tell them what to study & where to work, then expect a central planner to get the numbers right. There aren't enough geniuses for that to work. You have to let the smart ones figure out what the best use of their time is, like the West has been doing for the last few centuries.

Would be interested in your explanation of China.

Fwiw, I realized rather late that the South African apartheid government was actually a surviving axis power... With full on Nazi sympathizers at the helm through the eighties. Unchecked, fascist governments can certainly hang on for quite a while.

Eh? South Africa was in the British Commonwealth in WW2. I don’t understand your conclusion, please elaborate.

Apologies, I had certainly badly misremembered some basic facts...

From Wikipedia: "In 1930 the Hertzog government worked to undermine the vote of Coloureds (South Africans of mixed white and non-white ancestry) by granting the right to vote to white women, thus doubling white political power. In 1934 Hertzog agreed to merge his National Party with the rival South African Party of Jan Smuts to form the United Party. A hardline faction of Afrikaner nationalists led by Daniel François Malan refused to accept the merger and maintained a rump National Party called the 'Gesuiwerde Nasionale Party' (Purified National Party). The Purified National Party used opposition to South African participation in World War II to stir up anti-British feelings amongst Afrikaners. This led to a reunification of the Purified Nationalists with the faction that had merged with the South African Party; together they formed the Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party), which went on to defeat Smuts' United Party in 1948 in coalition with the much smaller Afrikaner Party. In 1951, the two amalgamated to once again become known simply as the National Party."

So the NP wasn't actually in power during ww2, but came to power fairly shortly afterwards, and enforced ethnic nationalism. Way back when I read Mandela's biography it struck me that this wasn't a historical coincidence, and that the leadership of the NP were very likely Nazi sympathizers, with a pretty long leash to carry out the white nationalist agenda that had been stopped on the global north.