You can achieve a lot of bad things that way too, with nobody to stop you. It's the promise of every totalitarian: free you from all the messiness of having to deal with conflicting opinions.

It is remarkable how well the tradeoff of "you don't need political freedom if the economic growth rate is high enough" works for China, and also previously Korea and Singapore. Even, to a certain extent, Japan - fairly high levels of political freedom, but somehow it's still a one-and-a-half-party state.