What is it with liberals and dictatorship?

By happenstance, I often hear Robert Reich's NPR commentary while I'm in the car. I'm always a little surprised when the announcers mention at the end that he was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. He seems so impossibly wrong all the time. How did he get to be Secretary of Labor?

Yesterday, he talked about China and how fab it was that a country didn't have to be a democracy to have a successful capitalist economy. (Reich's commentaries are not available from NPR, but transcripts are eventually available on Reich's site. Yesterday's is not up as of this writing) It struck me as the height of foolishness when I heard it. Democracy may not be required for a thriving economy, but civil liberty, enforced by rule of law, is. And how many countries have leaderships that abide by the rule of law without at least a little democracy? I can't think of any dictatorships that aren't hopelessly corrupt. And the long-term economic performance of such countries isn't so hot either.

Of course, Reich knows this. Here's his commentary from 2 weeks ago:

Economic freedom and civil liberty -- the two are inseparable. And both are threatened by unaccountable power that refuses to be confined by the rule of law. As they did centuries ago when confronting monarchs who claimed unbridled power to rule as they wished, business leaders must come to the defense of liberty.

Oh, but wait. He was talking about the Bushitler regime in that commentary. Apparently, business needs to be rescued from the Bush monarchy, but is doing just fine in the Chinese Communists dictatorship. There are thousands of such examples of liberals making excuses for communist regimes, but I'm still surprised by them. How many times can a guy apparently as smart as Reich be fooled by the "OK, this time we've got it figured out" promises of communists? The number seems limitless.

What prompted this post was reading this (via Instapundit) by Rebecca MacKinnon:

It’s actually not uncommon in China for people in one company to actively “tattle” on their rivals and get them into political trouble in order to gain a competitive business advantage. I saw it happen several times in the media and entertainment worlds when I was living and working in Beijing. This is one reason the communist party will stick around longer than many outsiders think. Businesses get greedy and try to manipulate the authoritarian system to their advantage, rather than working together to make the whole thing more fair, accountable, and transparent.

You mean people might game the system to increase their competitive advantage? And an authoritarian system might be more interested in holding onto power than promoting competition? Don't tell Reich. He'll be so disappointed.

Update: More on China's faux capitalism here.