> drowning in unnecessary regulations/taxes/red tape

I think that's wrong and it's biasing your interpretation of what is happening. First of all I don't think they are 'drowning', business and projects get started every day in Europe/America, and obviously there's great prosperity being created. Secondly, I don't agree they're unnecessary.

It's like saying that someone remodeling the first floor of a large apartment building, can move faster by just knocking down walls instead of first hiring a building inspector to identify the load-bearing walls.

Of course if you're an autocratic country that doesn't care about anything else than the currently stated party position, you can do things that are impossible in other places. But they're obviously going to run into problems doing this. And some kind of problems aren't of the kind that you can fix afterwards by a policy-change.

It's like the story of the tortoise and the hare. Careful consideration might slow you down at first, but it will end up saving much more time by not having to fix mistake as well as redo it better.

I can’t remember where I heard this from but I once heard that the ideal political system isn’t democracy, it’s a benevolent autocracy. While the CCP may have some corruption, I do get the impression that it is mostly benevolent and serves China’s best interests. Relative to autocracy, democracy is slow and pulls in different directions due to party politics and elections. I went to a museum in Hong Kong recently. It had a very obvious Chinese bias, but it clarified some things for me about how China sees itself. The CCP sees social cohesion as critical to the security of the state. If we look at Western countries like the US and UK, social cohesion is weakening, we’re extremely divided and addicted to bickering amongst ourselves.

Take the Charlie Kirk murder as a recent example which has sparked heated infighting between the left and right in the US. You’re all part of the same country but you pull in completely different directions and hate each other. Driving wedges like this is a tool adversaries can use to dismantle democracy.

> America is drowning in unnecessary regulations/taxes/red tape

Which regulations are unnecessary?

Those that make it more difficult to hire foreigners?

Those that put requirements on energy providers to invest in excess capacity so you don't end up in blackouts every time the grids are stressed?

Those that prevent companies from collecting minor data online?

Those that force major websites and devices to serve people with disabilities?

Or the national standards for healthcare data privacy?

I could go on and on, but every time people complain about regulations, they seem to be coming from a place where they don't realize that regulations have a purpose in general, they ain't there for the lulz.

Sure, there's always things to look at and review, that's the nature of progress, but to say that companies are drowning in regulations, what are those regulations?

Are you sure we can't find plenty of examples that would require more?

America is not drowning in unnecessary regulations, it's just struggling to accept that the rest of the world is recovering from the various atrocities of the past few hundred years, from which America remained relatively isolated due to its several lucky circumstances.

> America is drowning in unnecessary regulations/taxes/red tape.

You must be joking...

- Unlike most OECD countries, the U.S. lets employers fire workers without “just cause” or severance.

- The U.S. is the only OECD country with no national paid parental leave mandate.

- There is no federal privacy law or something like GDPR

- No nationwide rules or regulations on Payday lending caps with interest often >450% APR

- Fines for U.S. workplace safety penalties are flat and modest

- TSCA lets many chemical substances stay on the market, while for example in the EU, the REACH program requires precautionary testing and registration.

- U.S. oil & gas flaring rules are a joke

>independent observer from a third world country.

Have you ever lived in China or the west to see the systems work? What makes your observation worthwhile?

>clue

If it was so easy most developing countries more free, i.e. less politically controlled would be replicating PRC. But they're mostly not. Overwhelmingly not. What happens in most places is wealth/elite capture process grab most of the gains, which is typically meagre to begin with (i.e. not enough to lift out of low/middle income level), because most places don't have leadership in place to attract FDI to get that ToT to move past middle income. PRC didn't just "get" that all that because a commune did well and go lol free market, they playedout/engineered an entire Sino-Soviet breakup and slap Vietnam to invite US to the party after USSR (who was also tech power at the time) was stingy with ToT (due to other dram). Then it's meticulous process of state manipulating politics / organizing infra construction and JVs to get what's theirs.

THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS WITH ALL MODERN DEVELOPED SUCCESSES, i.e. asian tigers, they get on the good side of the rich hegemon + some competent execution. Even petro / resource state, muh free market isn't enough. Need to badwagon with someone who can offer ToT. Conversely all the resources in the worlds (IR, VZ) doesn't matter if you're sanctioned by the hegemon and prevented from muh free market activities if you can't even buy the tech stack to extract, or if you did can't see in the common market.

> pretty much all developed countries

Essentially all old stock developed countries developed from excess extraction from colonialisms/slavery. It wasn't freedom, it was some form of market + imperial industrial policy. Bluntly it was simply taking a shit load from others from barrel of the gun to accumulate riches that snowballed growth. Loot a bunch of people and use the gains to buy yourself nice things, put your kids and grand kids+ through school, and 200 years later they think it was because of the market.

PRC moving FAST without that stupid levels of external extraction or basically direct subsidies from US (most of the other tigers, or newly minted wealthy petro states essentially all US satraps) is wholly different scenario. It's actual state-building and domestic mobilization (bluntly: extracting domestic labour) maybe not explicitly by engineers, but by career bureaucrats under an incentive structure where their career path is tied to building national power. PRC also unique outlier in that they are large enough to resist US containment now that US decided to breakup and contain. Big enough to now be 2nd bandwagon option since PRC has enough tech stack to replace US in most categories.

Contrast to now shitholes like Iran and Venezuela, was doing well when band wagoning with US, then broke up, and US acrimonious in breakup, so they get less than nothing for spurning US in the first place. It wasn't because they somehow got more authoritarian / corrupt - scraps of pie usually enough in sufficiently rich countries, it wasn't because they can't free market inside country either, it's because they lost access to global market ran by US, which is fundamentally not a free market but a pay to access market, i.e. postwar PRC/CCP couldn't even pay to modernize postwar due to sanctions. Hence they turn into basket cases when that access is lost, because there's isn't a magic domestic configurable, free market or not that can make up for enforced isolation due to loss of global access.

So what is your theory of it?

Also, how is this an exception? Didn't many the other Southeast Asian countries do the same, with the result being less remarkable just because of their smaller size?