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The Spectacle Blog
Today the Wall Street Journal published a piece by SEIU president Andy Stern praising China’s economic model. Stern doesn’t come right out and say it, but he certainly implies in every way that China’s communist system works better than America’s free market one:
Some Americans are drawing lessons from this. Last month, the China Daily quoted Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, as saying: “I think we have come to realize the ability to plan is exactly what is missing in America.” The article also noted that Robert Engle, who won a Nobel Prize in 2003 for economics, has said that while China is making five-year plans for the next generation, Americans are planning only for the next election.
…
The current debates about China’s currency, the trade imbalance, our debt and China’s excessive use of pirated American intellectual property are evidence that the Global Revolution-coupled with Deng Xiaoping’s government-led, growth-oriented reforms-has created the planet’s second-largest economy. It’s on a clear trajectory to knock America off its perch by 2025.
…
The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model-so successful in the 20th century-is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century…
This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism. As painful and humbling as it may be, America needs to do what a once-dominant business or sports team would do when the tide turns: study the ingredients of its competitors’ success.
Of course the claim that China is somehow more successful than the U.S. is simply laughable, and the fearmongering about China “knocking the U.S. off its perch” is ugly. But what’s really chilling is that Stern thinks that China’s laws regulating the economy can be separated from all its other laws regulating human rights, free speech, freedom of religion, etc. I wonder what a persecuted Chinese Christian or a Chinese woman who suffered a forced abortion would think upon seeing this article.
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More Blog Posts by Joseph Lawler
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Clint| 12.1.11 @ 12:35PM
Stern is a Deconstructionist Agendist,who is an apologist for The Red Chinese,who will soon hit their artificially stilted Economic & artificially compressed Demographic Walls.
KATN| 12.1.11 @ 1:02PM
About the only thing that I could admire about the Chicoms is that an agitator and subversive like Stern would simply disappear and nobody would have a clue what happened until his family received a bill for the bullet from the state.
Big Java| 12.1.11 @ 1:07PM
This is the same ole crap about how we needed to
follow the example of the Japanese and then Europe and then...
Just get out of the way of the American people as
Reagan said and did and look what happened.
Tim| 12.1.11 @ 1:27PM
Wow. Big news flash. Andy Stern wants a communist America. What's your next headline? "Sun to Rise Tomorrow"? This is the guy who said years ago, " Because 'workers of the world unite,' it’s not just a slogan anymore. It’s the way we’re going to have to do our work."
George Lenard| 12.1.11 @ 2:26PM
"China's laws regulating the economy can be separated from all its other laws regulating human rights, free speech, freedom of religion." You said it (just like Obama said what the Romney ad quoted him as saying).
We CAN do it -- maintain these freedoms while planning and regulating the economy. And China may be unable to continue personal repression in the face of what is surely more economic autonomy than it once had. I think Stern's point may ultimately be that China may beat us to the middle -- where there is a good mix of private and government economic decisionmaking, combined with our cherished personal freedoms. If they beat us there, and if that is a better way, he is right: they will have a superior system.
Planning is not necessarily compulsion, nor is it micromanagement as to specific "winners and losers" (though it can be those things). Stern is absolutely right that you all on the right delight in "demonization of government and worship of the free market at a historical moment that requires a rethinking of both those beliefs." Government is not going to drown in the bathtub, Norquist notwithstanding, and those who wish to demonize it need to stop running in elections to so-called "lead it" (like the Republicans on the Super-Committee led us). And it is at least debatable whether certain massive problems we now suffer from are attributable to failures of the free market inherent in deregulation (because the extreme free-market model is deeply flawed, containing unrealistic assumptions) rather than lack of sufficient market freedom.
Big Java| 12.1.11 @ 2:55PM
George,
I do NOT want others to plan for me. I will
take care of myself and my family. GET OUT OF
MY WAY!
JP| 12.1.11 @ 4:24PM
Planning is compulsion. Without compulsion, why plan? The question, pray tell, is who gets to "plan"? Of course, being wired into the Beltway is a sure way to insure that your business model (and your business) survive. There would be no way for a business like Apple (a company that not only innovates, but creates trends) to have created either the ipod, iphone or ipad. Instead, with a planned economy we would still be using those crappy Compaq Ipaqs, or some Windoze Tablet PC.
And in China the workers are forced to work 12 hour days, and 6-7 day work weeks. Wages are frozen for most people, and only the politcally connected get ahead. China innovates nothing. It only worth in an economic sense is its cheap labor force.
USSAlabama| 12.1.11 @ 7:57PM
And consider that for those 6-7 work days at 12 hours the vast majority of Chinese get approximately 1.25 per DAY.
Neo| 12.1.11 @ 5:44PM
It's funny how when there is a Medieval Period reenactment, nobody wants to be a “serf.” I wonder what makes Andy Stern think he would be anything other than a serf.
USSAlabama| 12.1.11 @ 7:59PM
He thinks he would 'organize'. Look, Andy Stern could not survive as a Chinese in China.
NS| 12.1.11 @ 10:43PM
@ Neo: As I'm sure you know, when we reach the end of the Road, Mr. Stern will not end in serfdom as will the rest of us; he is a well-connected planner.
SE| 12.1.11 @ 5:57PM
The problem with planning is that it's not always clear which are the best steps to take. In China's case, for the past 30 years, "economic planning" was incredibly easy, at the conceptual top level: use their cheap labor force to become the manufacturer for the rest of the world, and reap the benefits of being a successful export-based econnomy. That has worked up until this point, not insignificantly because the rest of the world has (rightly or wrongly) found it in their interest to cooperate with that purpose, and allow it to happen. As China's economy matures, labor costs rise, and western economies become increasingly saddled with debt (not least from the enduring trade imbalances), this symbiotic relationship can be expected to run into trouble.
Secondly, perhaps the most striking thing about China over the last thirty years is the extent to which they have *abandoned* communism as an economic theory/approach, and in fact embraced free market principles for at least some portion of their economy (the portion that drives all the growth). "Communism" is still convenient for the CPC *politically*, but economically, they realized decades ago that it was killing them.
A good illustration of this point is a conversation recalled by Alan Greenspan in "The Age of Turbulence", in his chapter on China: he was meeting with a high-ranking Chinese official on economic matters (I don't remember who), and the official took Greenspan through the early history of their "free-market" experiment, in which they allowed small farmers to keep their profits from growing and selling food (which was previously forbidden), and how well it worked to alleviate a famine. That was when they realized that they were onto something, discovering the power of free markets firsthand.
China has been going in exactly the opposite direction which Stern assumes (and perhaps wishes) they were going. Although as Riehan Salam points out in his NRO piece on the subject, China has hardly been modeling western ideals along the way, and it's not clear that they ever will.
Perhaps the biggest issue, the biggest national/societal decision faced by any country in the years ahead is not whether the US will abandon free markets, but whether China will add the abandonment of their communist political system to their already de-facto abandoned communist economics. As (or if) their better educated, increasingly affluent, economically and financially sophisticated segment increases from about 10-15% of the population to, say 20 to 30%, the internal pressures to allow more democratic sharing of political power will become intense.
It may well be that the most interesting question will be whether they still try to call it communism and keep a straight face.
Mrs. Vito| 12.1.11 @ 8:13PM
Stern is an over-educated moron, who should get a real job. I discourage the WSJ from printing this journalistic schlock on its otherwise distinguished pages.
ReasonableViews | 12.2.11 @ 5:44PM
The United States has not maintained the highest standard of living of any large nation for well over a century because the Federal Government is particularly good at playing venture capitalist. When it fosters an environment that gives start up companies a chance to succeed, Washington D.C. is our friend. When it allows a few large financial institutions to control access to capital, it is not. http://bit.ly/rU3xRl