The Wall Street Journal Marches Toward Pravda With American Characteristics

Greg Ip, chief economics commentator for The Wall Street Journal, under the euphemistic headline “The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics”:

A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China
liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s.
Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.

Recent examples include President Trump’s demand that Intel’s
chief executive resign; the 15% of certain chip
sales to China that Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices will
share with Washington; the “golden share” Washington will get in
U.S. Steel as a condition of Nippon Steel’s takeover; and
the $1.5 trillion of promised investment from trading partners
Trump plans to personally direct.

This isn’t socialism, in which the state owns the means of
production. It is more like state capitalism, a hybrid between
socialism and capitalism in which the state guides the decisions
of nominally private enterprises.

China calls its hybrid “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
The U.S. hasn’t gone as far as China or even milder practitioners
of state capitalism such as Russia, Brazil and, at times, France.
So call this variant “state capitalism with American
characteristics.” It is still a sea change from the free market
ethos the U.S. once embodied.

Ip’s piece is, on the whole, a decent factual survey of the Trump 2.0 administration’s economic policies, six months in. (Or, if you prefer, one-eighth over, and a quarter of the way through until the mid-term election.) But I can’t help but feel that if it were any Democrat — Biden, Harris, whoever — whose early presidential term’s stewardship of our capitalist economy could aptly be described as “starting to look like China”, the tone would be less “a sea change” and more “ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME TOTAL FUCKING FREAKOUT”. It’s the same slippery slope of obeying in advance as describing blatantly unconstitutional shakedowns as “unusual agreements”.

There’s grading on the curve and then there’s grading on the curve. Ip knows damn well that if left unchecked, Trump’s mad-king style policies, like firing the economist in charge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the jobs report for July was bad, are going to prove disastrous. That move is more like North Korea than China, and everyone who doesn’t have Fox News injected into their veins knows it. Greg Ip is not drinking the MAGA juice, but he’s not calling fair balls and strikes, either. That’s a problem.

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