The American Conservative recently ran an article by Ron Unz which is a response to Acemoglu and Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail”, which argues that China’s growth will falter and America’s will resume because of the corrupt, “extractive”, one party rule in China versus the open, democratic rule of the benign American bureaucratic State.

Criticism of the American system of government-big business-bank partnership, in other times and places called fascism, has for too long been the exclusive domain of leftists, with soi disant conservative publications mocking any criticism of the corrupt symbiosis of government and the corporate world, especially “conservative” corporate sectors like weapons manufacturers and private prison operators.  Defense.  Law and order.  Those are conservative values, right?  Who other than a liberal would be against them?  So it is good to see a magazine with the word “conservative” in its title actually criticize our corporate welfare state.

Unz documents the rapid growth of the Chinese economy against the stagnant American median incomes of the last 40 years, and lists several areas where the Chinese have surpassed American business.  Despite this, China’s rise does not need to be seen as a threat since the global standard of living is increased by Chinese production.

Of course, China has its share of corruption and social problems with such a quick ascent, but this is a lot easier to take when real per capita income has risen by over 1,300 percent in 30 years.  The stagnant American worker seems much more resentful of his elites.

While China’s masses are benefiting from this progress, the United States is becoming more unequal, with the top one percent controlling about as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent.  The Chinese and American Gini coefficients are about equal now, and moving in opposite directions.  Thirty five percent of the last few years’ economic recovery in America has gone to the top .01 percent.  The government-corporate partnership funnels money upward.

The central message of the article is this:

“…although American micro-corruption is rare, we seem to suffer from appalling levels of macro-corruption, situations in which our various ruling elites squander or misappropriate tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars of our national wealth, sometimes doing so just barely on one side of technical legality and sometimes on the other.

Sweden is among the cleanest societies in Europe, while Sicily is perhaps the most corrupt. But suppose a large clan of ruthless Sicilian Mafiosi moved to Sweden and somehow managed to gain control of its government. On a day-to-day basis, little would change, with Swedish traffic policemen and building inspectors performing their duties with the same sort of incorruptible efficiency as before, and I suspect that Sweden’s Transparency International rankings would scarcely decline. But meanwhile, a large fraction of Sweden’s accumulated national wealth might gradually be stolen and transferred to secret Cayman Islands bank accounts, or invested in Latin American drug cartels, and eventually the entire plundered economy would collapse.

Ordinary Americans who work hard and seek to earn an honest living for themselves and their families appear to be suffering the ill effects of exactly this same sort of elite-driven economic pillage. The roots of our national decline will be found at the very top of our society, among the One Percent, or more likely the 0.1 percent.”