Andy Stern: China’s Superior Economic Model
The free-market fundamentalist economic model is being thrown onto the trash heap of history.
Andy Stern
The Wall Street Journal
12/1/2011
…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. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA’s results—a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1%—are pathetic.
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.
While we debate, Team China rolls on. Our delegation witnessed China’s people-oriented development in Chongqing, a city of 32 million in Western China, which is led by an aggressive and popular Communist Party leader—Bo Xilai. A skyline of cranes are building roughly 1.5 million square feet of usable floor space daily—including, our delegation was told, 700,000 units of public housing annually.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government can boast that it has established in Western China an economic zone for cloud computing and automotive and aerospace production resulting in 12.5% annual growth and 49% growth in annual tax revenue, with wages rising more than 10% a year.
For those of us who love this country and believe America has every asset it needs to remain the No. 1 economic engine of the world, it is troubling that we have no plan—and substitute a demonization of government and worship of the free market at a historical moment that requires a rethinking of both those beliefs.
America needs to embrace a plan for growth and innovation, with a streamlined government as a partner with the private sector. Economic revolutions require institutions to change and maybe make history, because if they stick to the status quo they soon become history. Our great country, which sparked and wants to lead this global revolution, needs a forward looking, long-term economic plan…
Read the entire article at The Wall Street Journal.
H/T Moonbattery
During the campaign that catastrophically resulted in his election, Barack Hussein Obama said, “Judge me by the people with whom I surround myself.” Prominent among them has been Andy Stern, who as head of the ACORN-affiliated SEIU…
…Stern belongs on the long list of avowed communists in Obama’s background (Barack Hussein Obama Sr, Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Van Jones, et al.)…
…Only in a picture with Obama do you find Andy Stern on the right…
Read the whole thing.
Related: Busted: Ayers Admits to Obama Fundraiser That Obama Campaign Called ‘Myth’
Update:
Common American Journal welcomes readers from Left Out in America.
