[Powerline] - From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else‐someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with "modern" intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control‐benign, of course!‐of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.
Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. Thus, liberals have eagerly calculated the future time when China’s GDP‐or alleged GDP, as dictatorships have always been better at producing statistics than goods and services‐would surpass ours. Given that China has three times our population, that would not seem to be a signal accomplishment. Nevertheless, liberals looked forward to it.
...I could be wrong; it has happened once or twice. But I suspect that the current public health crisis spells the end of China envy among American intellectuals. The context, of course, is the Trump administration’s standing up to China’s dictators. Like Toto, Trump has pulled back the curtain on the Chinese fraud. To coin a phrase, one might say that China’s economic "juggernaut" is in fact a paper tiger.
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