I was thinking recently about the public policy here in the US and all the talk about the "Up and coming China". It may just be my limited exposure but it seems to me that their advantage is simple: They are less ideological than we are.
Yes, less ideological. Notice that you don't hear much from them about "little red books" or revolutionary communism? In fact, they have been experimenting with capitalism for years, and even implementing it now!
The advantage of China is simple. They do socialism well, and capitalism, well, kinda ok. They are still new at it, but hey, they are getting the best of both worlds now.
The US, well, we do Capitalism pretty well. However, whenever it comes to needing to do anything the least bit "socialist" we argue, we hem, we haw. We CAN'T do anything socialist. So when we have to, when capitalism is really failing, we try so hard not to be socialist that we screw it up... usually badly.
Take health care here in MA. Its become pretty obvious that Single Payer healtcare is the only real solution. Health care just effects every member of every household.
However, Mitt couldn't do that. We couldn't have... socialism! So instead we implemented this horrid debacle. Mandate everyone buy insurance, mandate the state come up with some way to get low income people insurance. Then he cut and run.
It is unclear how this benefits us. We could have done something socialist. We could have done it well and solved a real problem that just does not seem to have any other good solutions. Instead we did everything we could to avoid "being socialist", and made absolute hash of it.
Could it be that the real problem isn't socialism? Is it ideology?
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