"The Chinese economy is growing so quickly that even the Chinese are a bit worried," reads a recent article from USA Today profiling the world's "hottest markets." "China's GDP soared 11% or more last year . . .Chinese stocks have been skyrocketing. Productivity has grown so dramatically that those that are getting jobs are making many times the salary than under the state-owned system."
Indeed, thanks to rapid private sector growth, China has managed to circumvent economic disaster, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of companies that were state handout jobs have been shut down. China Telecom has gained 93% in the past 12 months, and Sohu, a Chinese Internet portal, has grown 128%. The photograph accompanying the article shows a Chinese worker with a cell phone on each ear that she is testing for her company.
Stop and reflect on the significance of this. A nation that has endured decades of poverty, starvation, death, and destruction in the throes of its Communist government is beginning to make strides towards a relatively liberalized market. Its citizens are beginning to enjoy the freedom to increase their standard of living, no longer held down by a massively restrictive government.
One would expect, then, to hear the praises of free markets sung far and wide, for it is freedom that is proving itself once again to be the greatest antidote to poverty. We would expect Communism, in contrast, to be rebuked as a system that has resulted in millions of deaths during this century, 30 million in China alone who perished during Mao's Great Leap Forward.
But alas, at my university, which U.S. News this year ranked in the top 10 best national universities, the reality is not so.
Ask an average student what he thinks of capitalism, and he'll tell you it's responsible for all modern ills from pollution to poverty. He'll tell you that corporations routinely abuse workers, manipulate consumers, and were it not for extensive government regulation, would run rampant with greed. Ask said student about communism and he'll say that despite it being a well-intentioned system, it lamentably failed due to a few pesky economic miscalculations. "Good in theory, bad in practice" is the most common tagline I hear.
When the Conservative Leadership Association launched a flyering campaign last year to educate students about Marxism, a student told me that our literature was misleading because it failed to discuss the positive aspects of Marxism. When I asked him to which positive aspects he was referring, he touted the "good intentions" of Marxist thinkers.
So what's the big deal? What does it matter if professors sprinkle a comment or two about capitalist oppression into their lectures, or students agitate for government intervention in private industry or demand that we "Slap down corporate greed?"
For one thing, it's deeply insulting. When an economic or political system robs humans of basic freedoms, condemning them to lives of poverty, imprisonment, and in many cases, death, to search for the good in such a system does a disservice to its victims. It would seem to me that outrage is the appropriate response.
When said system lacks a mechanism of allocation and defies the notions of labor specialization and capital accumulation that have been shown to lead to prosperity, to call it "good in theory" is a gross misnomer.
But beyond adding insult to injury, ideas have real and dire consequences. The more we conceptualize free markets as the sin and government as the saving grace, the more we drift towards interventionist policies that worsen the real life conditions for many of our neediest citizens. Even in our own country, which is thankfully a far cry from communist, government policies have the effect of causing unemployment, increasing the cost of housing for the indigent, preventing people from accessing healthcare, and the list goes on.
At the end of the day, students must rise above what seems to amount to an aesthetic distaste for free enterprise. If their desire to help people is genuine, I trust that they'll look to freedom as the answer for China, as well as the United States.
April 12, 2004
