Recall what the totalitarian and mass-murderous regimes can accomplish:
- Leading-edge science (e.g. Soviet Union scientists and space program) and advanced weapons (Russian hypersonics, submarines, etc.)
- Mass industrial production (the 22 Chinese provinces being the world’s factory in the 2010s) to include mass produced nuclear weapons (on the order of 10,000 warheads controlled by the Moscow mafia)
- Control over almost the whole of Asia, chunks of Europe, etc.
and also recall where they perform poorly:
- Population growth (worse even than the relatively free industrialized societies)
- Corruption and waste
- Quality issues/cutting corners
- Domestic allocation of goods e.g. in not allocating enough production to consumer markets to sustain meaningful incentives
Moreover, their military power lies primarily in technological and logistic means, so their combat strength is misleading and their command effectiveness is poor. Due to weak economics and the purge of the Red Army caused by Stalin, the Soviet military machine threw millions of men to the slaughter in World War II, but nearly lost all of their territory to a grossly-overstretched and undermanned German force. The relative performance of the Russian military manpower only has decreased since then. In the 2022 Ukraine conflict, the Russians barely can hold any territory if the odds are anywhere near even. Hence the Russian military now is a liability for the Moscow regime that commands it, as it is weak in open conflict even with the Western-reinforced Ukrainians, let alone a country of even resources. Nor should we consider this Russian history as an anomaly; the Communist military of Mao not only suffered massive losses in Korea, it also had disproportionately poor combat effectiveness against the West in Vietnam, and even against the Vietnamese military itself. No one believes that the soldiers who will be sent off to fight to take Taiwan, are going to have any practical motivation to fight, or that the domestic population will show any support for the conflict as their only children disappear without a trace.
With all that said, they still can take territory from their neighbors, and launch nukes and bioweapons. Even their disproportionately weak conventional forces, still have the capacity to murder millions. These evil regimes still pose an active threat. However poorly they are organized, they are organized, and that counts for a lot of dead bodies, in the past, now, and in the future.
Therefore a society, not grossly more populous or larger in land mass, which intends to defeat these regimes in combat, and especially to deter them, must organize and run more effectively/efficiently than them. Major points from an economic perspective include:
- Deploy the similar or more advanced science
- Due to the infeasibility of ramping up mass production under a hail of missiles, a massive peacetime war machine must be built up, along with decentralized stockpiles of critical replacement parts such as semiconductors, which, being built in large, sophisticated factories that are easy targets for precision munitions, will be unavailable once the war starts
- Build peacetime mass industrial production to build and maintain this peacetime war machine without impoverishing the population (as the Soviets did), along with the oil tanks, etc. to sustain the fighting force
- Sustain efficient production over long periods of time
and there are additionally several general advantages in raw economics that could provide an advantage that the adversary cannot counter without fundamentally changing the character of their regime:
- The ability to grow a population/labor force/attract scientists and recruits, through superior material compensation (not just freedom and a cleaner environment, though those also are advantages of a free society)
- The use of a floating price system to more efficiently make production decisions, relative to the totalitarian command economies
- The appeal to market discipline, objective measures and third parties as a corrective measure to corruption, quality deficiencies, and general waste
In order to offset their manpower advantage, the troops must be better trained and motivated, and their commanders must be of superior skill and proportion to the forces they command. This requires:
- An free society with an ethic of individual action, that favorably contrasts with the prison states, so that people can have nationalistic sentiment and an instinct to resist
- A society that provides material benefits, ideally better than those regimes, so that people don’t look at (which we know in the macro to be fallacious) “authoritarian efficiency” as an incentive for cooperation/surrender
- Free reporting worldwide and the open/freely-discussed history, so that when we criticize the enemy, the public easily can verify that our claims are accurate
- In general a transparent approach and moderated working hours, so that people can recognize that they are free, and by contrast, can understand that our enemies’ subject populations are slaves (no 90 hour work weeks, 60+ hours in hell factories, etc.)
- Freedom of speech, the rule of law, and meritocracy throughout, but note particularly the point about the fitness of commanders – you need those things in order to create a capable command class, as well as for proper combat promotions. Moreover, if you have the rule of law and bonuses/reward for merit, you can get your lower ranks, journalists, etc. to flag and punish corruption, waste, war crimes, etc. which is a capability the enemy regimes have extreme difficulty employing.
The indirect demands for economic bulk output and efficiency require, at a high level:
- A relatively cheap but effective education system that goes all the way through postgraduate education, and includes world-class experimenters and researchers
- A moderated crime rate and good public health, so that all these elites you are growing in science, the military, and the workplace, can get old enough and stay healthy enough to pay back their costs/be effective
- An efficient labor marketplace that reallocates labor through layoffs and pay raises, and provides clear price and demand signals for retraining and adaptation