Free-market economist Veronique de Rugy asks Why Are Republicans Embracing Economic State Planning?:
China’s post-Mao economic boom has occurred only to the extent that the country became capitalist. With “Made in China 2025,” Beijing’s 2015 anticapitalist plan for an industrial policy under which the state would pick “winners,” China has taken a step back from capitalism. (It recently dropped the “Made in China 2025” name, though the policy remains.)
It won’t work, but China’s new industrial policy has worked one marvel — namely, scaring many American conservatives into believing that the main driver of economic growth isn’t the market but bureaucrats invested with power to control the allocation of natural and financial resources.
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China’s economic future is bright, but only as long as it rejects large-scale industrial policy and instead recommits to competitive markets. We shouldn’t copy its recent command-and-control playbook. Rather, we should stick with the time-honored policies that have made the United States the titan to topple in the first place: free trade, competitive markets, reasonable regulations and the rule of law.
Market-based policies (policies that flourish in conditions of limited government and the rule of law) are superior solutions to the commands of government (and the predations of well-fed interests – found even in the smallest places – that selfishly manipulate government for their own aggrandizement).