> When the United States wielded power over corporations in the postwar era, our overarching goal was — with some notable exceptions — stability, peace, and prosperity. When China wields its power over foreign corporations, the ultimate goal is — always — command and control.
That's some narrow-minded thinking. Two different words for the same thing. I'm sure the south american governments who were dismantled in the cold war era by the CIA would see the actions as "command and control" as opposed to peace and stability. Likewise, the chinese government is going to serve the interests of itself.
South America has a long tradition of interchangeable strongman governments, none of whom had any real interest in advancing the needs of citizens. Plenty of populist autocrats that paid lip service to social advancement, very little actual public service. It's understandable that the US would get a little jaded regarding which regimes to back.
I can easily see how a CIA official, tasked with determining how to best advance US interests in the region, but otherwise having a good bit of autonomy, would come to the conclusion that whichever regime was most amenable to the American way of doing things would also be the best steward of the public interest.
It's not like they had a bunch of upstanding, self-sacrificing public servants to choose from, and they deliberately chose the wannabe gangbangers to support. And Latin Americans themselves weren't much help either, often eagerly buying into the cults of personality that the strongmen built up. Hence the public fascination with thugs like Che and Escobar.
I think you'd find that there's a real, discernible difference between Chinese strong-arming and American interventionism, on both ideological and practical levels.
I'm sure you can find an equally great excuse for the reasons the CIA taught Pinochet's cronies how to torture people by putting one electrode to their gums and attaching another electrode to their genitals and passing several amperes through their bodies.
Or maybe you have a great justification for why they taught others how to hook up metal spring beds to the electric grid with the aim of getting sincere confessions and apologies out of people.
I'm equally sure the tens of thousands people that were "disappeared" by the regimes your glorious and righteous CIA sponsored really look forward to your justifications.
The CIA doesn't run nations and they didn't put Pinochet into power. You're drastically inflating their power over the world. The CIA are opportunists. You might start by applying responsibility to the countries in question for the actions of their own governments, and their own citizens who did the torturing and disappearing - while simultaneously not ignoring any terrible things the CIA has done. Trying to proclaim the CIA is responsible for everything is just silly, they're a bit player.
I'd say the CIA is the prime reason we got Al Quaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and all the other shitty orgs that the Great and Glorious United states of America is so scared of these days.
>If they were that powerful, they'd just hit the "Turn off Daesh and Al Qaeda" switches at the controls, wouldn't you think?
It takes an awful lot of patience, money and hard work to make constructive, trust-building relationships with people who have different beliefs and priorities than you do. It's tough work that only pays off in the long term.
Messing things up massively, however, just takes and handful of idiots with guns and a weekend.
Hurricanes (to put it in US terms) are powerful. But they don't have either off switches or controls. The CIA's influence in the world is just as strong or to put it in a way that your child-minds would better understand, reckless.
Are you a child, living in a constructed reality, unwilling to look past the set of beliefs that were erected by politicians, right-wing imperialist media and corporate empires? Or are you willing to find out, not only for yourself but also for future generations, how deep those rabbit holes go and how your democracies are in fact, Banana republics?
You need to think a little more critically about the actual mechanics of regime change and pulling off a coup d'etat.
Also it wouldn't hurt to lose the arrogance.
Running a country is not easy. You need to command loyalty from a group of people that can safeguard your place in the nation. Not just an army, but also groups of people who can fund and support that army. It's as true for a tiny island nation as it is for the USA. European colonialism had outsized effects on the Caribbean for that reason, way easier to keep a nation of 10,000 under your thumb than to control millions.
The CIA has resources comparable to a small army, but it must project these resources thinly across all the countries the US wishes to influence. It can buy guns and train limited numbers of rebels, but it cannot create a ruling party where before there was none. It can alter the course of politics in a nation, but that influence can't come close to actual control unless the nation is very small.
Once in awhile they got lucky, and their group of trigger-happy idiots overwhelmed the other group of trigger-happy idiots. It's arguable as to exactly how much damage this does. Obviously it has a negative effect, political chaos is generally worse for a people than stability. Try to measure the effects in aggregate though, and comparing them to what would have happened otherwise, and it's hard to really tell.
Political upheaval can destroy individual lives, but generally the industries underneath are left alone, it makes no sense, say, for a rebel group to destroy farmland, or a factory. Your efforts are much better directed at military targets, you're going to want that factory to keep making things once you're in power, being needlessly destructive hurts your interests too.
Never said that American interventionism was a good thing or that regime changes are justified. Don't know where you got that from but it's not from me. I'm just trying to put it in perspective.
> South America has a long tradition of interchangeable strongman governments, none of whom had any real interest in advancing the needs of citizens.
This statement is generally true. Areas that were setup as encomiendas ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encomienda ) right from the period of Pizzaro and Cortez have retained that exact flavour. Individual strong men rule because that's exactly what was setup. Any "citizen" (ie: indigenous person, slave, or otherwise disenfranchised individual) who tried to go against this system or even escape its clutches was punished severely. It is extremely hard to break that structure. If you wonder why that did not happen in North America, it was because the North was much more sparsely populated and so the colonizers had to setup systems that gave rights to everyone (except of course the sparse indigenous population that needed to be exterminated since it could not be "encomienda"-ed), just so that the companies that sponsored the colonization in North America (like the Virginia company) could turn a profit. It is noteworthy that the Virginia company for example, did actually plan to use the same encomienda approach but was startled to find that there weren't enough compliant indigenous people to enslave. They then switched to trying to strongarm the colonialist/settlers but this had disastrous results. It was only thereafter they gave rights, and privileges to "citizens". This all happened when they became desperate to get a return on their investment.
So yes, your statement is absolutely true. Long tradition indeed. Since 1492 in fact.
To lay the blame Latin America's political failures wholesale on the West is to greatly overestimate the West and underestimate Latinos, not to mention to completely misunderstand geopolitics. One of the first things that gets forgotten about colonialism is how utterly tiny the European population was in comparison to the natives. Without the cooperation of the natives, Europeans could get nowhere.
Natives were not the pathetic, stupid rubes that people often seem to think they were. They had their own political systems, agricultural systems, militaries. Sure, the locals were shocked when the white men with the powerful guns landed, but you can bet that every single one of their leaders had contingency plans in place for just how to deal with Cortes and his contemporaries once their political usefulness ended. Europe simply didn't have the manpower to field large enough armies in the New World to get what they wanted by force.
South America has always been geographically stunted compared to North America. It cost too much to get there, what they had wasn't of interest to Europe, the terrain inhospitable. I think we vastly overrate how much damage Europeans did directly.
> South America has always been geographically stunted compared to North America.
I believe you are very much mistaken unless your definition of "geographically stunted" and "has always" is different than what is generally accepted.
The facts show clearly that prior to 1492, Central and South America were where the larger, more organized, more sedentary, more productive civilizations were. That's why the Incas, Mayas, Olmecs, Aztecs, were all NOT in North America. So any theory of "geographical stunting" would need to explain what changed in the geography after 1492.
> Without the cooperation of the natives, Europeans could get nowhere.
I'm surprised that anyone would believe this "cooperation" of the natives. I have a simpler explanation. "Natives" did not cooperate willingly. Instead, through our vastly superior military technology, we imposed "cooperation" on the natives in Central and South America, while in the North, we imposed something completely different as already explained above. In the Central and South American region, we setup political and military structures to preserve ourselves at the top and keep the entirety of the other population at the bottom and also to prevent their escape. That was the defined purpose of the encomiendas. We wanted to do the same in the North but could not. North America escaped this fate precisely because the native population was far too sparse to enable viable encomiendas. So our corporations had to find alternate ways to gain profit, and that turned out to be, by enabling and giving rights to the settlers/colonialists. That difference is effectively the primary cause of what has given rise to the vastly different fates between the 2 regions.
> So any theory of "geographical stunting" would need to explain what changed in the geography after 1492.
What changed was technology. Once you have ships going back and forth across the Atlantic, everything changes. Europeans introduced cows, sheep, pigs, chickens. The New World's only domesticable native animal is the llama, which is the main reason why civilizations sprung up in Central and the northern parts of South America, that's where llamas were.
Now, to the Europeans, with vastly superior farming technology, the Caribbean and North America were veritable cornucopias of geopolitical possibility. Islands sheltered plantations. Europe could project real power only very closely to the shore, where the big naval guns could reach. The reason was supply. To maintain a group of soldiers requires not just food but adequate clothing, weapons, ammunition, and horses to carry all of that.
It took over a century of growth for a colony to get to the point to where it could maintain and supply an army for deeper treks inland. By that time the colonies would have been deeply entrenched in native political systems. Because the warships protecting your colony could only hang around for so long, colonies were quite vulnerable to native military action, or even just having them hang around outside the settlement and killing whoever goes outside, say, to chop wood. It made sense for settlers to be nice to the locals, at least at first.
CGPGrey just put out a fantastic video comparing the Old and New Worlds that neatly explains why Europe won and the Western Hemisphere lost. The actual mechanism was disease, which does not require a supply train, but there's a lot more to the story.
Arguably I am not very versed in US politics and South American Interventionism, but the Guatemela Coup d'état [0], wich was supposedly lobbied by a fruit company is hard to read differently than a US corporation pushing its own interest.
I know this is a tu quoque fallacy but you can not expect any powerful state or actor to not wield its power to advance its own agenda just because it is "evil". (Actor being US, China, EU, Google, Amazon, etc)
> would come to the conclusion that whichever regime was most amenable to the American way of doing things would also be the best steward of the public interest
I doubt public interest meant the populace of the governments they were dabbling in. They're looking first after the CIA's interests, next after the US government, next after US citizens, and maybe finally everyone else.
Honestly, the "real, discernible" difference to me is that I'm american and they're not. I can deal with having a rational conversation about the benefits and drawbacks of playing international politics like a zero sum game, but masking jingoism with the guise of absolute morality leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
>>South America has a long tradition of interchangeable strongman governments, none of whom had any real interest in advancing the needs of citizens
I can think of 6 democratically elected socialist leaning governments attacked / disposed of by the US and US based interests and am barely knowledgable of Latin American politics
Has any government ever viewed their own actions any differently?
Everyone sees themselves as the good guys, everyone justifies what they do as the right thing from the biggest empires down to the smallest country. American, British, Soviets back through all European empires to Romans and beyond.
This whole good vs evil of the current global empire and the war names they give to operations is laughable. Yet they say it with a straight face and it is lapped up by those who get their news solely / mainly from the mass media
"The turning point came with the triumph of modern libertarianism, with its sophisticated, Orwellian method of hiding corporate power behind the rhetoric of individual liberty"
Had me until the part about the "triumph of libertarianism," a system which has never been tried anywhere.
Libertarianism was tried in the US during the Gilded Age[1], and failed spectacularly. Power quickly consolidated in the hands of the (unelected) very few, and in a form of modern feudalism, much of the population came to live under the boot of the robber barons and called on the government to save them. That's how the strong American federal government came to be. The US is one of the few places where government regulation actually came about to free people from libertarianism.
Somewhat ironically, Ayn Rand came to the US in the aftermath of the backlash, not knowing that all of her ideas had been tried and the mess they caused cleaned up not long prior to her arrival.
[1]: Of course, some would say that the US in the Gilded Age wasn't really libertarian, but it was closer to true libertarianism than anyone has ever gotten to true communism. So anyone who says libertarianism hasn't failed because it hasn't been tried must admit the same about communism.
Libertarianism was tried in the US during the Gilded Age
It's very popular among some people to quote the Gilded Age as an alleged failure of libertarianism, but they can never seem to pinpoint just exactly how it was libertarian. Certainly, the climate was economically liberal... and that was about it. The Gilded Age was about industrialization, not any political order. There was no one there to "try" anything. I assume China and Singapore are libertarian, too?
It is similarly popular among some to paint libertarianism as some lofty ideal distant from any actual human history so that post facto it can never have been tried so it always holds its promise.
China and Singapore are most certainly not libertarian as they impose very strong central government regulations, whereas gilded-age America had a small and weak government, and was almost devoid of regulation (at least de facto; any de jure regulation could be skirted with bribes). The result was neo-feudalism, which came as a surprise to no one as feudalism has grown organically in almost every society with a weak government in human history, and with similar results -- a handful of people enjoying the product of the miserable masses.
There's the whole elephant in the room of de jure segregation and disenfranchisement that significantly weakened the demand side's ability to engage in voluntary contracts. That's not some incidental thing to gloss over, but a clear case of crippling binary intervention.
There were plenty of land grant programs at the time, such as the Homestead Act. The state, through common law, retained eminent domain and condemnation of private land for nominally "public" purposes. There were several immigration restriction acts passed that served as a free trade barrier.
Let's not forget that the railroads which characterized the Gilded Age were kickstarted by government initiative in the form of the Pacific Railroad Acts, which ensured land and bond grants.
There were at least a dozen tariff acts passed by the time the Gilded Age was emerging, and indeed U.S. trade policy was quite protectionist back then. The U.S. have also been involved in plentiful military interventions, some overseas, others covered by the Monroe Doctrine, since the earliest days for economic and hegemonic reasons.
The federal government was weaker, but not as much as often presented. They tried wholesale embargoes as early as 1807, enacted tariffs, controlled trade (Commerce Clause and other justifications), intervened militarily frequently, and remember that the Constitution in general greatly expanded federal power relative to the prior Articles of Confederation.
As such, I'd think it disingenuous to qualify the Gilded Age as "libertarian". There wasn't really so much as a system back then, it was a country in an identity crisis trying to see what worked, and often coming to protectionist conclusions that would foreshadow what was to come (ironically, tariffs are much less of a problem in the present than back then). It was economically liberal... that was it. You can't really characterize it as anything beyond that, the circumstances were rather unique.
> There's the whole elephant in the room of de jure segregation and disenfranchisement that significantly weakened the demand side's ability to engage in voluntary contracts. That's not some incidental thing to gloss over, but a clear case of crippling binary intervention.
How is disenfranchisement relevant? And why would legal segregation matter when blacks were a small part of the population? You could say that the USSR being autocratic is also not something incidental to gloss over (and I'd argue a far greater deviation from the ideal). Feudalism has always had "demand-side" problems, with or without legal roadblocks.
> There were plenty of land grant programs at the time... The federal government was weaker, but not as much as often presented...
Sure, but all of it amounted to very little regulation compared to any modern Western countries.
> You can't really characterize it as anything beyond that, the circumstances were rather unique.
True, but again, it was still closer to the libertarian ideals than the USSR ever was to communism, and it would be at least as equally disingenuous to conclude that we can't draw any conclusions from that era to libertarianism. Bear in mind that the Gilded-Age America was only the latest such experiment in the West. All other (older) examples of weak governments gave rise to feudalism and similar results.
So while libertarianism later created a well-formed political theory behind free markets and low regulation, it is a stretch to claim that its practices have never been tried. If a valid experiment can be nothing short of full global libertarianism, then it will forever be a beautiful utopia in the minds of the precious few who still prescribe to that ideal.
When you have structural barriers around the right to contract, then yes, that's a practical issue with your libertarian narrative.
Sure, but all of it amounted to very little regulation compared to any modern Western countries.
We actually have an even better example of a contemporary Western nation achieving great results through economic liberalization: the United Kingdom repealing the Corn Laws and abandoning mercantilism circa the 1840s. Agrarians and formerly rural landowners did get shafted in the process of industrialization (as it tends to occur), but free trade policies were a boon for everything else.
But there's also the whole problem of just looking at macro-level "regulations" without taking into account the vastly different social and technological climate. See below.
True, but again, it was still closer to the libertarian ideals than the USSR ever was to communism
Smells of a fallacy of composition.
it would be at least as equally disingenuous to conclude that we can't draw any conclusions from that era to libertarianism
You can, but it's very limited. The Lucas critique demonstrates that analyzing historical macrotrends in of itself is useless because of a lack of policy-invariance. You need good microfoundations for proper modeling. Hence my assertion that calling the Gilded Age a "libertarian failure" is so simplifying as to be little but a political provocation.
You're echoing the old Methodenstreit debate all over again.
If a valid experiment can be nothing short of full global libertarianism, then it will forever be a beautiful utopia in the minds of the precious few who still prescribe to that ideal.
No, it doesn't have to be a "global libertarianism". The problem is again, you're extracting one component (relative economic liberalism, but still ignoring barriers to voluntary relations) in specific complex time periods as a catch-all argument against "libertarianism" even though you clearly do not have the proper microfoundations of libertarian theory to even make such a judgment at all.
Thing is that libertarianism, like communism, is an extreme ideology. A liberal economy is great and regulation is great, but they so far seem to work best when both are applied in moderation. So far, all attempts to significantly increase one or the other have failed. It is, of course, possible that they weren't taken far enough, and something happens at a point more extreme from the ones tried -- a change of trend -- but there it is reasonable to believe that this is not the case.
> analyzing historical macrotrends in of itself is useless because of a lack of policy-invariance
This applies to any ideology, especially the extreme ones. Like I said, it is in the clear interest of utopians to keep their dreams unrealized. What better way to do it than to disregard as invalid any form of approximation? This, too, is something we have seen over and over.
> You're echoing the old Methodenstreit debate all over again.
Historians are careful not to try to predict the future, but sometimes certain things can strike a familiar chord, especially when utopian ideologies are concerned.
But let me state my original point more clearly: Libertarianism has been tried to a similar extent as any extreme ideology ever has.
Whether you want to take that as "libertarianism, just like most other extreme ideologies, has never been tried" or as "libertarianism, like other extreme ideologies, has been approximated and failed" is up to you. Whether you find this satisfying or not as an objection to the ideology is up to, and it was not my intention to claim that we can predict the exact outcome of a full realization of libertarianism based on history. Personally, I don't need to, because I find libertarianism to be the morally repugnant brainchild born of pure intentions[1].
> but still ignoring barriers to voluntary relations
Because I studied history in grad school I can tell you with a relatively high degree of certainty that the greatest barriers to voluntary relations -- or, rather, the most economically significant barriers -- have rarely been legal (in fact, the ability of the state to effectively enforce its laws is rather new, and is far, far more recent than feudalism), but economic. I don't know if you can extrapolate from that to the future or not (historians are careful about extrapolation), but so far that has been the case.
It is true that certain groups of people have suffered terribly due to legal restrictions, but they (naturally) were never a majority. It is the majority (who are mostly poor or poor-ish) whose freedoms are restricted via economic means.
[1]: it is an ideology that effectively lets the rich keep all their power, but takes it away from the poor, whose power is in their numbers and in coming together to regulate, and thus somehow balance, the power of the rich; I favor letting anyone use their power equally, like in an anarchy or a social-democracy; I can accept libertarianism as possibly working well in some imagined, fresh-born society, a society of spherical cows, if you will, but not in our real-life society, in our real world
> So far, all attempts to significantly increase one or the other have failed.
Actually, there is a very wide range of balances that work and have worked in the modern developed world, and countries in that group have made fairly big changes within that range without failing.
There are things outside that proven range, though, and you would be correcet to say that what hardcore libertarian advocates seem to seek [0] seems to be among them.
[0] I say "seem to seek" because hardcore libertarians are often much clearer about what they don't want than what they do, and about dismissing every real world example that is raised to suggest problems with their approach with the claim that the problems pointed to are a result not of the relative libertarianess, but the fact that the government involvement in the example, however minimal, was still too much.
We'll have to agree to disagree, then. You've already concluded that libertarianism is not simply impractical, but also that it is, as a normative statement, morally repugnant and always leading to rich oligopoly. And that, the power of state regulation actually works for the people by definition. Yet you also mention anarchy as a possible alternative (which is considered by the overwhelming majority of people to be the very definition of impracticality), so I'm not even sure where you stand.
Either way, we're going nowhere. I'll cease from here on.
> also that it is, as a normative statement, morally repugnant and always leading to rich oligopoly.
Those are two separate things and I only assert the former (although I think most libertarians have the best intentions). As to the latter, I just think that whatever evidence we have seems to suggest that this is the case, and it is reasonable to believe it is so (and that does not preclude that it may also be reasonable not to). I'd never make such a strong assertion, though.
I also did not conclude that libertarianism is impractical. In fact, I think evidence suggests it is very practical (and systems similar-enough to it, IMO, were the norm throughout most of Western civilization), only it might be quite bad for the majority of people.
I mainly just took issue with the statement that libertarianism has never been tried by saying that we did try approximations of it which are no less accurate than all other approximations of similarly extreme ideologies.
I do, however, feel that arguments with libertarians often hit an impasse when discussing not ideas but facts -- facts that are hard to conclusively ascertain -- such as the actual dynamics of society. I feel that libertarianism pre-supposes a human dynamics which is at odds with everything I've learned in my (not too many) years of social studies; libertarians, of course, would disagree[1].
> Yet you also mention anarchy as a possible alternative
I did no such thing. I simply stated that both anarchy and social democracy ideally allow all people to express their power freely, unlike libertarianism or communism, which are too freedom-constricting for my tastes. I never said anarchy is practical or something I actively strive for; merely that it (as well as social-democracy) is compatible with my moral views. Of course, history has shown that the main problem with anarchy is that it is unsustainable, in that it naturally gives rise to some form of government.
[1]: Although the number of libertarians who have actually studied human society is vanishingly small. There are hardly any libertarian sociologists, anthropologists or historians. There are more than a few economists, but economists rarely agree on anything... :)
Although the number of libertarians who have actually studied human society is vanishingly small.
That you keep resorting to Courtier's replies, train-of-thought generalities over any specific libertarian philosophy (instead presupposing Gilded Age = libertarian) and psychoanalyses of libertarians is revealing, I think.
Economists rarely agree on anything, but if you're an example of the average sociologist or anthropologist, then surely that profession has an even worse track record.
I am most certainly not resorting to psychoanalyzing libertarians. I just said that I believe libertarianism is a perfectly logical conclusion for a reality that (to me) seems alien to the one we actually have. One notable (though far from unique) example is the libertarian concept of freedom of choice: It is perfectly reasonable for an idealized person, but at odds with our experience. Countless psychological experiments have shown that it is quite easy to restrict people's effective choice with nothing more than simple manipulations (with varying degrees of effectiveness, yet all fall very far from violence or even the threat of violence), yet libertarians insist that this does not constitute an actual restriction because their idealized person can somehow choose not to fall victim to those manipulations, even though the actual number of people who seem to be able to do so in the real world is small. Other examples include libertarian notions of people's motivations (again, perfectly reasonable yet at odds with findings), libertarian ideas of how power propagates in society and more.
It is therefore not interesting to argue with the libertarian ideas -- they are perfectly reasonable. There's no point in arguing with the desire to build winged bicycles if their inventor assumes a weaker gravity or greater human strength and stamina. The problem is with the premise. Libertarians insist that our findings are inapplicable to testing their premises, yet fail to provide evidence to support theirs[1]. So I think generalizations are very much in order, because this puts libertarianism itself in a (large) class of utopian ideologies, all of which share quite a bit in common[2].
> if you're an example of the average sociologist or anthropologist
I am neither. After getting my math degree I briefly entertained the notion of becoming a historian of medieval Europe until I realized academia is not where I want to spend my time.
---
[1]: Some would gladly provide supporting evidence from approximations of libertarianism, yet discount counter-evidence on the ground that it is only an approximation.
[2]: What sets libertarianism apart from some is its idealization of some things we know quite well, and so some of its followers share the ideology but not the premise or the goals. They root for the ideology precisely because they want the very same results that many (like me) believe would be bad for most people, because they believe they will be among the few who will benefit. This, too, is common among some utopian ideologies (like social Darwinism). But it means that you can find some libertarians who describe their utopia as something that sounds almost like communism (no one has too much power over others), while others describe a jungle where they (so they hope) are at the top of the food-chain. This divergence of vision is actually rather unique.
Yes, that one, and in the process turned large portions of the population into serfs to the point where they cried for help. No one will deny the great progress the US made in the gilded age, but no one would say it is an age one we'd like to repeat (as its name suggests, it is not generally regarded as a good period in American history; important? certainly; interesting? absolutely; but good? not really). The USSR made tremendous progress during Stalin's various five-year plans, but that, too, is something no one wishes to repeat.
Both cases prove that it is possible to make great leaps by enslaving your populace. Of course, we've known that since the Romans. The trick is not to make progress. The trick is to preserve your values while still making progress.
Communism and Libertarianism are two ideas that had their chance. They both yielded quick leaps forward but also ruined the lives of millions. Their proponents would claim that neither was really tried in its true form -- and both camps would be absolutely right -- but I think most people have the good sense to trust that any further experiment (of either) would turn out similar enough to previous ones.
Communism and Libertarianism are two ideas that had their chance.
[citation needed]
I don't know about communism. Where libertarianism is concerned, there is no evidence for it being tried beyond a post facto shoehorning of the Gilded Age as "libertarian" for what was just economic liberalism. Sounds like people who criticize it don't have any idea of what it entails.
Exactly, isn't neo-liberalism the moniker we generally use to describe the set of ideas that cluster around Friedman and his subscribers? As in, neo-liberal policy. Is the author equating "modern libertarianism" with neo-liberalism?
For most of China's Imperial history they had a tributary system. Which I think ended in 1912. It is not really surprising to see it come back in a some form.
A lot of China's tributary system was money / resources flowing from the center to the outlying areas, to keep them favorable / quell unrest / keep the center stable. China is very geographically islanded (depending on the dynasty, the fee to keep disarray at bay depending on the territory occupied; the many 'great walls' over the centuries basically land-grabs coupled with payments for compliance).
But this article is about Ford. Ford is an extremely low-key brand in China. GM is the biggest US brand, but there are far more VWs, Audis and BMWs than GM. Also more BYDs, who despite a reputation for poor material quality are making big pushes in buses, conventional hybrid and electric, and other public transport. BYD will be the name to look out for over the next 15 years.
China is no more the new master today, than Japan was in 1992. The exact same things were claimed about Japan back then. Comically, the timing was exactly wrong, just as it is now: this is the end of China's boom, not the beginning.
Aren't you forgetting the small detail that China is literally ten times the size of Japan?
Even if your claim is true, and you don't present any evidence to that effect, the order of magnitude size difference makes it rather a different ball game.
No, I take that into account. China is ten times larger in population, but that doesn't mean they can grow ten times larger economically. There are limits to both sheer consumption / production within N amount of years in terms of how fast the global economy can grow, and limits in terms of how many resources a nation can realistically consume. For China to be ten times larger, they'd have to figure out how to produce the world's GDP almost twice over. It's impossible, the global economy in real terms is growing at a few points per year, China's growth must inherently move toward that line as it gets larger, just as the US has.
It's not hard to find evidence for China's boom being completely over. The best estimates on their actual GDP growth, already have them closer to 2-4% growth, if any growth at all if you go by trade volume / trains / baltic index / copper / construction / concrete etc.
Ten years ago they began to shift to massively taking on debt to continue to fake growth. Countries only do that when their organic growth is completely exhausted. It's exactly what Japan did when their bubbles began to unravel, and their money expansion began to implode. When the great recession hit, that was the end of the temporary consumption binge that drove most of China's 2000-2008 growth. Now they're arguably the most indebted nation in world history on a GDP ratio basis, and it's still getting worse, while companies are being artificially floated so banks don't have to own the vast bad loans outstanding, perfectly repeating what Japan did with zombie corporations.
I would like to address the theme of "the U.S. is no better than China!" when it comes to trade.
It is true that both have countries have manipulated and are currently manipulating levers in greedy self-interests. It is also true that the U.S. is not perfect. Far from it: I'm sure many Russian commenters have some words about the western-bred neoliberal experts who preached "Shock Therapy" to Yeltsin (Spoiler alert: oligarchs).
The difference between China and the US, in my opinion, lies in their motivations and how it translates into economic action. The West, like other "enlightened" spheres before it, has had some element of "for the greater good" guiding its vision. One historical example is that instead of colonizing Europe after WW2 (like the Soviets did), the US instituted the Marshall Plan. You can argue that this aid was given in exchange for a degree of suzerainty ( don't bomb NATO! ). Fundamentally, however, those states regained their status as independent actors and were not seen as extensions of the US.
Security is very much the heart of the matter here, it's the age-old question of "how much control does the government need over its spheres to feel secure and therefore strong?". Although not always spoken, a country normally ought to be as protectionist over its trade as it is weak in that area of trade. In the U.S., it happened with Japan and Cars as the article points out, and Great Britain and textiles if one goes back even further.
With this rationale in mind, Xi Jingping insists that China is still "developing"[1], that China can be excused for so-and-so action to maintain its economy, even though it wields more power than almost all other "developing nations" in the same space put together.
What's often overlooked is that it's not just economic (in)securities at play here. China demands the submission of foreign companies because China is politically insecure. Consider a related section from the "X Article":
> Easily persuaded of their own doctrinaire "rightness," they insisted on the submission or destruction of all competing power. Outside of the Communist Party, Russian society was to have no rigidity. There were to be no forms of collective human activity or association which would not be dominated by the Party. No other force in Russian society was to be permitted to achieve vitality or integrity. Only the Party was to have structure. All else was to be an amorphous mass. [2]
Although China hasn't been at this totalitarian stage for a long while, the concept of "amorphousness", that the only "true" political form is the central power and all else exists in service to it, is one of China's current most debilitating problems. If you don't have multiple organizations each with their own sphere of power, how can you express the multifaceted will of your citizenry (the definition of a functional civil society)? While the Chinese people have to date built many forms [3], the central government is certain to come down hard on any actual power of the forms as fast as they develop. [4].
To summarize: China acts with greater force internally because China's leaders are afraid. Very afraid. First, they don't have the same political mechanisms for dealing with foreign political influences that the U.S. has. In more concrete terms: the last time they allowed for other forms, in the same way the U.S. did and does, came just before their tanks crushed students underfoot in their nice, government square. History in mind, China's leaders have continually resorted to harsh action in all spheres to maintain their form, which they cannot bear to be without.
The anecdotes on corporate and cultural acquiescence to the Chinese state are not all that convincing. Overall, industrial interdependence and trade is employing way more people than otherwise, in a strictly macroeconomic sense. Normatively, it might result in executives in jail, but fewer people everywhere are starving. Americans aren't killing people all over the world at the same magnitude that they used to—especially not killing Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese people, whom they're now trading with. Surely that's a good thing.
But let's examine this accusation that culture has acquiesced. Gravity's trading the real Chinese antagonist for the fake Russian one is pretty damning, but has the author ever watched an episode of South Park? Trey and Matt do not trade in the most friendly opinions. The best point you can make from an example like Gravity is that mainstream cultural products are cowardly. But that isn't really all that surprising. I don't see the author writing a big cautionary tale about how Disney stars don't write enough songs about climate change and cuts to food stamp programs. That self-censorship started long ago, way before there was a Chinese market for American media. Self-censorship and the dumbing down of mainstream media—i.e., endogenous U.S. state and corporate propaganda—is a way bigger threat to our way of life than the organization of Chinese markets ever will be.
What about the other corporations, like Walmart, Apple, GM and Rio Tinto, who got their executives jailed for not accommodating Chinese state demands? I can also say: so what? These companies make a bunch of physical junk, they don't make political statements or cultural products. And they make this junk primarily for the benefit of shareholders.
Asceticism (in its many forms, like lower demand) is a bigger threat to junk makers than Chinese market controls. Ask Paul Krugman: A slump in global demand put way more American workers on the street than a free trade deal ever has. Germany's savers and domination of the currency union puts way more people on the street than reckless borrowing in a small country like Greece ever has. One man's income is another man's expense. The system by which that exchange happens is sort of irrelevant, depending on where you normatively value people like shareholders in the grand scheme of things.
The Chinese state, through blunders, and Western regulators, through austerity, magnified unemployment—they're both equally stupid. You can't blame trade—demand has to come from somewhere, and it seems totally reasonable that demand comes from people outside your national borders. It's something that the Soviet Union never figured out but the Chinese government did. Demand is a more fundamental economy property than the author admits, and it's not obvious how to increase demand while reducing global trade.
But the few billions of dollars shareholders miss out on out when the Chinese state strongarms executives? Who gives a shit. The author's blaming the very industrial interdependence that in a macroeconomic sense is keeping millions of people employed, while at the same time kvetching about some bad deals some companies got sometimes.
I think he gives Google too much credit for not having business in China. Besides funding the author's think tank, whom exactly are they employing? Which millions of factory workers? At least the junk makers are directly putting money into the pockets of many millions of Walmart and Apple/Foxconn employees.
Google's search engine facilities an absolutely colossal amount of commerce that must employ millions of people indirectly. But so does Baidu. It's a Pyrrhic victory for free speech. At the end of the day, Chinese people don't need Google. They need rice on a plate.
The alternative world, where American "relies" on "itself" for everything, is not one we want to live in. Billions of people—Chinese people, Indian people, the world's people—stuck in a much worse poverty because they can't make something Americans can buy. The subsequent wars due to poverty. The nationalism and jingoism a closed-trade policy breeds, and the consequences like institutionalized racism, colonization and vindictive foreign policy. That was reality up until the 1970s, just when global economic liberalization started to reach billions of people. If you weren't born among a lucky few prior to that time, you wouldn't want that system. This "Chinese master" worldview is ridiculous.
Perhaps you have missed the point of the article? It is not arguing that there haven't been great benefits to trade, nor is it arguing for strong protectionism.
Instead it is arguing that the strategy of easing up trade rules so US corps could go into China, which it was thought would ultimately tame China into becoming a more free and open society, has backfired both figuratively and literally (as was shown with US entertainment). China is now exerting political and cultural control over the US via its corporations, which at least from the perspective of the US, is not a desirable outcome.
You can argue that lots of jobs and economic prosperity has been created and this is a fair trade for some independence lost, but most of the benefits have gone to China rather than the US.
It seems like a simple case of Newton's third law. You can push a small economy around, but it would be naive to believe that you can push against a larger economy without experiencing a reaction.
> When the United States wielded power over corporations in the postwar era, our overarching goal was — with some notable exceptions — stability, peace, and prosperity. When China wields its power over foreign corporations, the ultimate goal is — always — command and control.
What a load of propagandistic garbage. Stability, peace, and prosperity for everyone the US government liked at the terrible, terrible expense of everyone else. It's insulting to my sensibilities. I honestly cannot figure out where to start in dismantling this pile of garbage.
How about all of the coups sponsored by the United States to remove threats to the hegemony of U.S. corporations? It's a fun exercise to count them.
> How about all of the coups sponsored by the United States to remove threats to the hegemony of U.S. corporations? It's a fun exercise to count them.
Ok, count them for me. Are you going to say Vietnam? That was France asking the US to get involved to save its colonial possession. Are you going to say Iran? That was the UK asking the US to get involved.
You are correct that global political manoeuvring is rarely a straight forward case of just one country involved. Countries come together when it suits them and oppose each other just as readily.
The US does sometimes come under unfair criticism for being the cause of all evil, when the reality is a lot more nuanced, but when you are sitting on top the pile, everyone is gunning for you.
However, as the parent comment pointed out, the US has been "involved" in many coups / destabilising existing governments. Do you think the US would help out in French / British coups if it wasn't in their interest?
That's some narrow-minded thinking. Two different words for the same thing. I'm sure the south american governments who were dismantled in the cold war era by the CIA would see the actions as "command and control" as opposed to peace and stability. Likewise, the chinese government is going to serve the interests of itself.