We all know that China is industrializing at a growth rate of 8 to 10 percent per year. China is on track to pass the U.S. as the largest economy in the world in 20 to 25 years, and China is determined to give its people a chance at this high standard of living that we enjoy.
For a hundred years we have been one of the largest oil-producing countries in the world but with a 60 percent poverty rate and now we are canceling the historical debt.
Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy. If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist.
Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.
The U.S. berates China for its exchange rate policy, which Washington doesn't like. But one-sided pressure on China to change its exchange rate is misplaced.
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse, capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes.
Because of poverty, we must adopt the capitalist means of production to develop our resources to get rich. However, if we ignore the issue of social justice at the beginning of China's industrialization, we will sow the seeds of class warfare in the future.
The capitalist system has lifted mankind out of mass poverty. It is this system that in the last century, in the last generation, even in the last decade, has acceleratively been changing the face of the world, and has provided the masses of mankind with amenities that even kings did not possess or imagine a few generations ago.
When China was only Communist, everyone received the Dalai Lama, but now that China is hyper-capitalist, he gets blacked out.
The core of the Marxist critique of capitalism is that although the individual capitalist is rational (as liberals assume), the capitalist system itself is irrational.
As soon, however, as capitalist competition has definitively established the equal rate of profit, that rate becomes the starting point for the calculations of the capitalists in the investment of capital in newly-created branches of production.
We have believed for many years, much earlier than anyone else was talking about this issue, that it was in the interest of China to evolve to a more flexible exchange rate system.
As a result of the current universal benefit, the poverty rate for seniors in America is about 10%. Without the universal benefit, it would be over 50%.
We already had an adopted daughter, 10-year-old Courtney, from my previous marriage. To me, there is no difference between 'natural' and 'adopted.' My own childhood showed me that when it comes to loving your kids, concepts like that don't apply. I was the oldest of six, and three of my siblings were adopted. Mom and Dad even took in foster children. 'There are no limits to how much you can love,' Dad always said.
Well, our economy is very strong and growing. We have created 5.4 million new jobs in the last 3 years. Our unemployment rate is better than the average unemployment rate of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
It has not been possible to build that society. It set very high standards, because not only would life in the Soviet Union or in any other country which adopted that system, have to be just as good as in the Capitalist world, it would have to be better. So that other peoples, other nations would want to join it, and obviously we have failed in that.