I hadn’t considered the Pakistani case; but I was thinking of that of Egypt; where the military involvement in the economy is hard to describe as a success(except for the military; turns out you can turn a decent profit if your competitors are sufficiently hamstrung).
I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if there are some marginal-tax-rate lunatics out there who could convince themselves that such an arrangement is amazing because it provides StateSec with a source of operating income that doesn’t show up in tax rates; but it’s hard to read the record of the examples provided to us as anything other than that of a dysfunctional and inefficient piece of legally privileged command economy embedded like a leech in the economic activity of the nation as a whole.
