Ultimately at issue today is how China and Russia can take the lead in creating an alternaive aimed at minimizing the cost of living and doing business. At the national level that requires rejecting financialization, its associated privatizatiion and neoliberal tax favoritism for rentiers. The objective is best met by creating a domestic monetary system and central bank policy promoting industrialization, public infrastructure investment and the upgrading of labor while taxing away rentier income. That is the opposite of U.S. demands to privatize infrastructure and sell off to rent seekers. internationally, a financial system is required that avoids the Treasury-bill standard and the resulting U.S. free lunch enabling the military adventurism and neoliberal of Dollar Diplomacy.
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The looming global fracture is becoming a fight over the most basic organizing principles of economics. All successful economies throughout history have been mixed. What U.S. Cold Warriors depict as an economic rivalry between America and China is not really a competition between national economies. It is a global conflict of economic systems. At issue is what is what kind of economy the world is going to have. Will it be a privatized, Reaganized, Thatcherized and financialized neoliberal economy organized by central planning in Wall Street, or will national governments maintain their policy independence and take take their economic and social destiny into their own hands?
The choice is between a financialized world order that aims to privatize infrastructure and create monopoly rents for credit creation, transportation, education, health care, communications, prisons and pension funding as in the United States, or a mixed economy keeping basic infrastructure in the public domain, to be subsidized so that their services can be provided at minimum cost or, ideally, freely, whil taxinb awat FIRE-sectoe rentier income instead of giving it tax favoritism.
The coming multipolar world will not be called a “Chinese century” or that of any other national economy. because the epoch of unipolar dominance is over. Perhaps it simply will be the un-American century that turned into a detour with the Great War and its long aftermath.