China will “fail” as long as it sticks to socialist/statist economic management. Its One Belt, One Road is a big Keynesian infrastructure boondoggle, passing no known market tests. China suppresses speech. That dampens the entrepreneur. For further insights on China will fail, see here, here, here, here, and here. Failure means it won’t be the great economic success that it advertises, that it hopes for, and that commentators and strategists may be taking for granted.
China can turn around if it abandons socialist policies and adopts free market policies, including the protection of private property rights. The same goes for America.
The CIA was consistently wrong in over-estimating the economic might of the USSR, and this created an entirely undeserved U.S. respect for central planning and Keynesian economics. If the U.S. leadership repeats this error for China, the strategies they adopt with respect to China will be flawed.
Socialism is dead. It lasted about 200 years. It still is a feature of the world’s governments, because it takes time for such movements to die. It takes time for old and wrong ideas to die out and for new and right ideas to replace them. But socialism has no moral, no intellectual and no practical grounding. It’s a failure on all counts. Libertarians have every right to be proud that such giants as Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe have killed off any possible avenues of respect or validity for socialism.
China, despite its motion toward capitalism, which itself is strong evidence along with the failure of the USSR that socialism is dying before our eyes, thinks that it can become a great power through socialism. This is not going to be the case. Socialism always holds people back, and the Chinese people are no exception.
5:16 pm on May 31, 2018
