Choosing China

The Chinese government is actually a party/government. It runs very much like any other corporation with a promotion ladder, management posts, etc. The part/government also owns many of China’s large corporations just as a large US corporation owns its subsidiaries.  Like any well run corporation, China Inc tries to build its capital. that is wealth used for productivity.   As long as China has good leaders, this works. But, likw any other business, China will fail if the management is slef serving and corrupt.

One major reason this matters is the issue of opportunity.  To my mind the major issue in 1776 was not democracy, it was opportunity.  Americans did not want the Crown or the upper classes of Great Britain determining how we would make a living.  We fought a war against taxation without representation.

China addresses this with a corporate structure. the party  We have no equivalent.  US government leaders are driven by many issues, not always by the long term economic welfare of the US.  American leaders who promoted opportunity are among our stars.  Jefferson, focused on land, the idea that farms .. labeit on land taken from the Indigenous Americans,  were the real capital.  Jefferson also, however, was adamant about free education.  Lincoln, leaving aside the hoor of the civil war, was also obsessed with opportunity .. the transcontinental railroads and the land grant act were his legacy.  Ironically, these were also major ideas of Jefferson Davis. It was Teddy Roosevelt who widened the scope, seeing the US as a world economic power while also understanding the need to prevent corporations from controlling the free markets.  It is fascinating that Jefferson had the same worry, even before we had a legal definition of a corporation.   FDR deserves huge credit not just for WWII, but for the national economic planning that made our corporate engines able to power that war and for the heritage after the war, esp. the GI Bill. , MLK, the only non President on my list, would have been a great ally of all these predecessors.  he understood that our racism was hurting all Americans and depriving the US or its greatest capital … the productive resource of American stuck in the periphery by all forms of bias .. whether that was race or class.

Obama is the most recent member of my pantheon.   I have no doubt about what Obama did, his vision was and remains long term. BUT the damagto American opportunity e already done  since WWII, especially under Reagan but ALL of his successors., is very deep.  Here area few examples:

a. The GI bill. This was the single greatest boost to mobility. The fact that these were GIs is incidental to the huge numbers it served. Today, the cost of an education is prohibitive.
b. Failures of healthcare. Healthcare in EVERY other industrial nation is a public and individual burden. Only the US has placed that burden on our businesses. This is a huge anti-competitive burden that encourages outsourcing.
c. Degradation of public education, while elite private education has flourished. Teachers outside the US are a highly respected profession, in the US they are at the bottom of or educated heap. At a higher education level, the post war opening of elite schools, funded by the GI bill, are now gone.  Harvard, Stabford,  MIT, Hopkins .. these awesome world leaders are becoming increasingly classcist.   Jefferson and King would scream about this.
d. Failure of vocational education.
e. Immigration policies that do not recruit the best and the brightest>
f. Failure to invest in infrastructure.
g. Mega investment in a military that looks disturbingly like the 19th century British Navy while China invests in the Silk Road, the South China Sea and may even be building a rival to the Panama  canal.

As for China, if upward mobility is a measure, we are no longer in their class.  China Inc understand the idea that people are capital.

As for Trump, he has not proposed ANY policies that promote opportunity. actually quite the opposite.