China and Vietnam, two of the largest Communist countries, average annual income is $8,400
Bangladesh, Russia, Ethiopia, and Egypt are the four largest dictatorships, average annual income is $5,200
The seven largest democracies (including “flawed democracies” - India, Brazil, Japan, Mexico and Phillipines) and the US and Indonesia, average annual income is $21,000. The “flawed democracies” avg. is $13,400, bringing the overall avg. down.
^Flawed democracies are defined as countries with free and open elections and normal recognition of citizen rights and liberties, but may supress media and political opposition and critics.
My point is that “free market economy” is an oxymoron. In a totally free market, some parties become significantly wealthier than others. The thing people do with significant wealth is to use it to gain influence over the system, in order to protect their wealth.
This is normal and essentially inescapable, because wealth creates an insulating effect that sepsrates the wealthy from those dirty peasants. It reduces the wealthy individuals’ reasoning capacity by obfuscating real life from them: wealth literally makes people stupid.
So you institute a free market economy andit might start out ok, but it leads to oligarchy/plutocracy (at least, that seems to be the case, as we have no data on free market economies starting from scratch).
Unless you start from absolute anarchy, there have to be some controls on the market for it to function rasonably. If you leave the wealth ceiling uncapped, you are going to end up with not a free market economy, because significant wealth, passing mere comfort, is about gaining control over other people.
“Free market economy” is just neoliberal twaddle that sounds so good on the face of it but obscures an underlying lack of pragmatism, or even outright deceit.
Some parties becoming wealthier than others is close to universal for human societies. Certainty it is universal for societies that we internet posters live in.
While Omar_Little’s link is to a rather far right organization (Heritage Foundation), and some of their rankings can be questioned (Italy less free than Guatemala?). But they measures on a dozen different factors that can with a little work be disaggregated.
The Heritage Society picture, in terms of this thread, is that there is a strong correlation between freedom to form and maintain private businesses, and democracy – but the correlation isn’t perfect. The biggest outlier, previously mentioned, may be Singapore, which really does have major democratic deficits.
I will let you have that, on the basic principle that statistics always provide a complete and accurate picture of what is going on in society and are never manipulated.