Free Market: The
government has decided that less intervention on its part will be better
for economic growth. Is this a new initiative coming out of Washington?
No. This is the thinking in Beijing.
Under the headline "China Cuts Red Tape As Premier Li Shows Stimulus Reluctance," Bloomberg reported last week that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who "pledged to reduce the government's role in the world's second biggest economy after a new leadership took over in March," wants to cut red tape and regulation.
Bloomberg went on to report that Chinese government "authorities" are "reluctant to use stimulus to counter a slowdown, saying China must rely on market mechanisms to aid growth."
Sounds like the opposite of the Barack Obama government, which is obsessed with stimulus spending and is a regulation-writing machine.
Since Obama has taken office, the U.S. government has engaged in nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending — and the president demands even more while taking the federal regulatory regime to a new extreme.
The stimulus was passed in 2009 with the promise that it would not let unemployment go higher than 8%. Of course it did, peaking at 10% later in the year and going on to set a record by racking up 43 straight months at 8% or higher.
While the current level is down to 7.5%, it's misleading.
As we have noted before, just 58.6% of Americans work today, down from 60.6% when Obama took office. This shrunken labor force participation rate means that the real unemployment rate exceeds 12%.
The stimulus didn't exactly move the economy, either. We've had the worst growth in six decades.
"Obama's first term," says Jeffrey Anderson of the Pacific Research Institute, "puts the paltry level of growth during Bush's second term in a newly favorable light."
Writing in our Issues & Insights pages in February, Anderson said that according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the "average annual real GDP growth during Obama's first term was a woeful 0.8%."
Along with the struggling economy have come millions of struggling Americans: 50 million — 17% of the country — are living below the poverty line. This is an alarming level not seen since the late 1960s.
Washington is not only a font of useless spending, it's also a red-tape factory.
The annual federal regulatory burden is at an all-time high of $1.8 trillion, says the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has just released "Ten Thousand Commandments," its annual report on the regulatory excesses of Washington.
That figure is a milestone; it's the first time, says CEI, that the estimated cost of regulation has exceeded half the cost of the federal government.
Furthermore, the Obama administration has overseen "three of the four all-time high" regulation page counts. The record of 81,405 pages of regulation was set in 2010.
So what does China know that Obama doesn't?
Maybe some of Beijing's top-ranking officials have noticed that America's (mostly) free-market economy has through its relatively brief history produced the greatest wealth and prosperity known to man.
Could be that they've watched Sweden return to a liberal economy, abandoning its cradle-to-grave welfare state because it failed to produce.
It's possible that they've seen the blessings of capitalism and learned that private-sector investment builds strong economies while government spending holds them back.
Quite possibly, China has discovered that its communist system, the same one that brought so much misery to the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba, will never yield abundance and riches.
Consequently, this puts Obama and the Democrats who support his liberal policies to the left of China. It's the wrong side of politics and the wrong side of history.
Under the headline "China Cuts Red Tape As Premier Li Shows Stimulus Reluctance," Bloomberg reported last week that Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, who "pledged to reduce the government's role in the world's second biggest economy after a new leadership took over in March," wants to cut red tape and regulation.
Bloomberg went on to report that Chinese government "authorities" are "reluctant to use stimulus to counter a slowdown, saying China must rely on market mechanisms to aid growth."
Sounds like the opposite of the Barack Obama government, which is obsessed with stimulus spending and is a regulation-writing machine.
Since Obama has taken office, the U.S. government has engaged in nearly $1 trillion in stimulus spending — and the president demands even more while taking the federal regulatory regime to a new extreme.
The stimulus was passed in 2009 with the promise that it would not let unemployment go higher than 8%. Of course it did, peaking at 10% later in the year and going on to set a record by racking up 43 straight months at 8% or higher.
While the current level is down to 7.5%, it's misleading.
As we have noted before, just 58.6% of Americans work today, down from 60.6% when Obama took office. This shrunken labor force participation rate means that the real unemployment rate exceeds 12%.
The stimulus didn't exactly move the economy, either. We've had the worst growth in six decades.
"Obama's first term," says Jeffrey Anderson of the Pacific Research Institute, "puts the paltry level of growth during Bush's second term in a newly favorable light."
Writing in our Issues & Insights pages in February, Anderson said that according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the "average annual real GDP growth during Obama's first term was a woeful 0.8%."
Along with the struggling economy have come millions of struggling Americans: 50 million — 17% of the country — are living below the poverty line. This is an alarming level not seen since the late 1960s.
Washington is not only a font of useless spending, it's also a red-tape factory.
The annual federal regulatory burden is at an all-time high of $1.8 trillion, says the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has just released "Ten Thousand Commandments," its annual report on the regulatory excesses of Washington.
That figure is a milestone; it's the first time, says CEI, that the estimated cost of regulation has exceeded half the cost of the federal government.
Furthermore, the Obama administration has overseen "three of the four all-time high" regulation page counts. The record of 81,405 pages of regulation was set in 2010.
So what does China know that Obama doesn't?
Maybe some of Beijing's top-ranking officials have noticed that America's (mostly) free-market economy has through its relatively brief history produced the greatest wealth and prosperity known to man.
Could be that they've watched Sweden return to a liberal economy, abandoning its cradle-to-grave welfare state because it failed to produce.
It's possible that they've seen the blessings of capitalism and learned that private-sector investment builds strong economies while government spending holds them back.
Quite possibly, China has discovered that its communist system, the same one that brought so much misery to the Soviet Union, East Germany and Cuba, will never yield abundance and riches.
Consequently, this puts Obama and the Democrats who support his liberal policies to the left of China. It's the wrong side of politics and the wrong side of history.
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