U.S. vs. China: A battle of ideas, not militaries
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Highlights
- China may have a communist flag, but America has created a system based on spreading the wealth around — not to the poor, but to the rich and the well-connected — via inefficient industries like health care, construction, and finance. This kludgeocracy has largely substituted for real redistribution, but at the cost of societal efficiency.
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Doing this will require a country-wide change in mindset. No longer can we think of the U.S. as “the richest and most powerful country in the world”, which often just seems like code for “a fattened-up piece of livestock to be slaughtered up and divided first-come first-serve”. The financial crisis, the Great Recession, Covid and climate change should already have given us a burning sense of urgency and forced us to accept that our systems are going to have to change in order to become more efficient and effective. There has been some progress in that direction, but not nearly enough.