> Wait - wasn't it relatively free-markets and rule-of-law property rights that enabled the west to outcompete the USSR, spending just a small fraction of GDP on defense compared to the Soviet defense percentage of GDP?
This worked when the US and USSR had approximately the same population size and the USSR was trying to keep up with US military spending. Probably not as well when China has three times the population of the US and doesn't care to install the number of troops in Cuba that we pay to maintain in Japan and South Korea.
> And didn't relatively free markets succeed while soviet communism collapsed under its own economic weight?
The USSR and China are both described as "communism" but they're not using the same system at all.
The USSR was a democracy and so its government was plagued by all the corruption and principal agent problems inherent in government spending by a large centralized elected government, except that in their case it was the whole economy.
China is basically operating a country like Rockefeller operated a monopolistic corporation. It's less centrally planned than the USSR. They use internal competition. The principle difference from the US economy is that it's not an elected constitutional government. There is no takings clause, no EPA or FTC, no National Association of Realtors, no free press. They call themselves communists but they're really fascists -- the merger of state and corporate power. What the robber barons would be if they were also kings.
Not exactly. Mussolini's "corporatism" was more encompassing -- not just industry but also guilds, clans, the military. But what hasn't been merged with the power of the state in China?
This worked when the US and USSR had approximately the same population size and the USSR was trying to keep up with US military spending. Probably not as well when China has three times the population of the US and doesn't care to install the number of troops in Cuba that we pay to maintain in Japan and South Korea.
> And didn't relatively free markets succeed while soviet communism collapsed under its own economic weight?
The USSR and China are both described as "communism" but they're not using the same system at all.
The USSR was a democracy and so its government was plagued by all the corruption and principal agent problems inherent in government spending by a large centralized elected government, except that in their case it was the whole economy.
China is basically operating a country like Rockefeller operated a monopolistic corporation. It's less centrally planned than the USSR. They use internal competition. The principle difference from the US economy is that it's not an elected constitutional government. There is no takings clause, no EPA or FTC, no National Association of Realtors, no free press. They call themselves communists but they're really fascists -- the merger of state and corporate power. What the robber barons would be if they were also kings.
That doesn't collapse like the USSR.