The New York Times recently carried a story detailing China’s increasing economic clout around the world, brought about by billions of dollars in cash and grandiose socialist projects in targeted countries. Focusing on Ecuador, a country whose government several years ago forced the U.S. government to close its foreign military base there, the article points out how China is investing billions of dollars in that country as well as other places around the world in the attempt to “win diplomatic allies and secure natural resources around the world.” The projects that China is building and funding in Ecuador include roads, highways, bridges, hospitals, tunnels, and even a “network of surveillance cameras.”
Not surprisingly, this phenomenon has U.S. officials terribly concerned, especially as they see much of the world turn against the United States for the way it extends its hand of friendship — through invasions, occupations, wars of aggression, support of brutal dictatorial regimes, coups, regime-change operations, troops, military aid, torture, and foreign military bases.
So how are U.S. officials responding to these overtures of foreign friendship by the Chinese government? Viewing China as an economic “rival” who is seen as becoming overly “aggressive” and “assertive,” U.S. officials are responding in the same way they always have to the socialist world — by becoming more socialist than the socialist regimes they view as “rivals.”
A good example of this phenomenon involves the Export-Import Bank, the socialist or “crony-capitalist” institution that was recently permitted to die a quiet death but that President Obama is now trying to bring back to life. The Ex-Im Bank was established as part of the socialist-fascist economic program known as the New Deal that President Franklin Roosevelt foisted on the American people during the Great Depression. Like Social Security, another socialist program instituted by FDR, the Ex-Im Bank became a permanent part of America’s governmental and economic system.
As Veronique de Rugy points out in an article in Reason, the Ex-Im Bank is a governmental “agency that mostly extends loans and loan guarantees to large foreign companies to buy U.S. products.” If the debtor defaults on the loans, the American taxpayer picks up the tab.
Important questions naturally arise: What is the legitimate role of government in a free society, one based on free-market principles? Should government be in the business of loaning money to foreigners so that they can buy products from U.S. businesses? Should government be taxing people in order to give the money to others, either directly or indirectly?
Both Democrats and Republicans love the Ex-Im Bank, in part because the big companies that are benefiting from this corporate socialism are major campaign contributors. But another reason is the old “they are doing it and so we have do it too” excuse. As an article on the Ex-Im Bank debate on Newsmax.com put it, “The White House has argued that U.S. companies and workers would be disadvantaged without the Ex-Im Bank, and that firms in countries like China would step in and win new business.”
This is not the first time this excuse has been used to justify America’s abandonment of freedom principles. Think back to the end of World War II. Americans were told that in order to combat the Soviet Union, America’s World War II partner and ally, in a Cold War, it would be necessary for America to adopt the totalitarian structure known as the national-security state, a structure that was inherent to both the Chinese and Soviet governmental systems.
The idea was the only way to ensure that America would remain “free” was to fight fire with fire by becoming like the enemy that supposedly was trying to conquer us. “It’s all temporary,” Americans were told. “As soon as we have won the Cold War, everything will return to normal.” Of course, it never did, not even when the Cold War ended in 1989.
That’s how Americans ended up with a system involving ongoing crises, wars, invasions, occupations, assassinations, torture, indefinite incarceration, foreign empire, foreign interventionism, kidnappings, wars of aggression, renditions, and all the rest.
Think about the U.S. national-security state’s longtime Cold War obsession with regime change in Cuba, an obsession that has lasted long after the end of the Cold War. Objecting to Castro’s socialist economic system, what did U.S. officials do? They imposed vicious economic controls on the American people by criminalizing their spending of money in Cuba. The embargo on Cuba was a classic case of using American socialism to combat Cuban socialism.
Or consider President Kennedy’s and the national-security state’s battle against Fidel Castro’s attempt to subvert or overthrow vicious pro-U.S. right-wing regimes in Latin America. Responding to Castro’s and communism’s increasing popularity among the Latin American poor, Kennedy and his minions instituted the Alliance for Progress, a socialist program that took money from American taxpayers and gave it to pro-U.S. Latin American regimes.
This is all wrongheaded and has been from the start. Americans should never have surrendered their rights or freedoms or their original governmental system and they should never have abandoned their free-market economic system, not even as a way to combat communism and socialism.
How should America respond to China’s international socialism today? Not by trying to outdo China with more socialism but instead by completely dismantling all of America’s socialist and interventionist programs. That’s how we lead the world to freedom, free markets, and a limited-government republic — by example.