Communist China has better and more modern airports, city highways, shipping terminals, etc than United States. this is no big surprise since we have $500,000,000,000 trade defici with China every fricking year! Transfer of wealth, thanks to career politicians in pockets of Wall Street.
1. These places are all newer than ours.
2. Their totalitarian government can simply displace millions of people to build those things without having to worry about any kind of legal process or financial compensation.
That’s true. Like Japan, China decided that a form of export-oriented managed trade would make their country wealthy, or at least vastly wealthier, than a policy based on David Ricardo’s free trade ideas circa 1800.
I’d say that after 30 years or so the evidence is in.
Ricardo was writing when populations and factories weren’t globally mobile like they are today. Paul Craig Roberts has been saying that what we are seeing today isn’t free trade as envisioned by Ricardo’s theory, it is instead global labor arbitrage- absolute advantage as opposed to Ricardo’s comparative advantage.
In the years immediately following WWII the vast majority of goods consumed by Americans were made somewhere in America. We had imports, but we didn’t have plants picking up wholesale and leaving the country to replace their American employees with a foreign workforce.
I seem to remember Say’s Law which went something like “supply (production) creates its own demand”. It’s fancy economist jargon for saying that producing something gives you buying power. When you export your factories you lose the buying power that they used to provide for all of the people who were part of it.
But apparently that’s The Best of All Possible Worlds to many who continue to believe that the best policy is to do nothing. Of course we do provide welfare to the ruins of the Rustbelt, and it seems that many of the remaining have found a new way to spend their time with meth and other recreations so there’s that.