Or at least efficient enough that illiberal movements can't exploit frustration at that inefficiency to seize power.

For that matter, despite all the creepy enthusiasm for dictatorships in this thread, they tend to be remarkably incompetent, being even more dysfunctional than democracies due to lacking their corrective mechanisms.

Despite the myth, Mussolini never made the trains run on time--he just relaxed the definition of "on time" until the trains were never officially late and then punished anyone who complained.