Horatio Alger Multiplied by 1.3 Billion
“My mother and father went through the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Feng said. “They had no chance.” He continued: “When I was in grammar school, the Cultural Revolution ended. When I graduated from university in 1992, that was the year of real reform. Deng Xiaoping encouraged students to go into business and become entrepreneurs. Before then, if you wanted to be an entrepreneur, you would sink like a stone. But after that, anyone could be an entrepreneur.”
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But look at what else happened: motivated by the prospect of wealth, people started companies. And as those companies succeeded, millions of new jobs were created.
I have written about the importance of capitalism to improve life for people around the globe. I have also discussed how many don’t understand what capitalism is (the general idea that capitalism is largely about those with the gold making the rules, which it is not).
Capitalism fundamentally is about allowing market to determine how to allocate resources (and government protecting that function along with others such as providing security, regulating externalities…). There are serious problems with in the USA in this regard – with enormous political favors granted those giving politicians enormous payments and oligopolies restricting the market from working properly. The government fails to properly regulate oligopolies, as dictated by capitalism – to prevent the markets to be dictated to by organizations pursuing their own interests, again due to large payments to politicians by those favored by preventing capitalism from working (either that or just a co-incidence that those making big payments just happen to give to politicians legislating [and overseeing regulators] against capitalism).
Just to state the obvious, Chinese government policy and practices also conflicts with capitalism frequently.
Related: Estate Tax Repeal – What is Wrong with Copyright Taking Public Good for Private Special Interests – Bill Gates: Capitalism on the 21st Century – The Future is Engineering – Making a Difference – Diplomacy and Science Research
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he joins as many as 10,000 corrupt Chinese officials who have fled the country over the past decade, taking as much as $100 billion of public funds with them…
“Shares in the yuan-denominated CSI 300 Index traded at 16.2 times earnings this month, compared with 8.6 times for 43 mainland companies in Hong Kong…”