Nations founded on liberty and freedom will always be the most efficient. The only reason they seem to be more wasteful and inefficient is that the population is aware of the waste and inneficiency that exist.
In line with VDH, I believe that democracies are more efficient and dangerous than they appear, the exact opposite of dictatorships, which are never as dangereous or efficient as they seem to be.
By definition, dictators don't get the information they need to make good decisions. The more brutal and murderous the dictator is, the worse his disconnect with reality tends to be.
How would you like to have been the scientist or bureaucrat assigned to tell Saddam that his WMD program wasn't working? You wouldn't. You'd probably lie and tell him everything was going great, unless you could pin responsibility for the failure on someone else, preferably a rival.
Dictators, who tend to be megalomaniacal by nature anyway, are constantly told what they want to hear, which is exactly the opposite of what they need to hear.
As with other things, this is the exact opposite of what the rulers, the people, are told in a democracy, where the MSM tends to focus only on the negatives. I know we get tired of this, but at least it tells us where we need to change.