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Was and am fascinated by how a Mises adherent would interpret and seek to reconcile the strength of the Chinese economy! Yes low taxes will leave more reward for productive work but to ascribe Chinas incredible economic growth to low taxation alone is simply absurd and obviously wrong. There is a lot more to Chinas success- in many ways things that will have most libertarians seriously stressed. The first thing to be considered is history- Chinas millennia of history and especially since the modern era where British imperialism humiliated the Chinese from the Opium wars onward. Today and since the modern opening of China to the world since Deng took power China has employed a highly centralised approach to its development which has delivered incredible results...and it was not simply based on low taxes. Multiple factors are involved but primarily important has been the deliberate encouragement of productive enterprise where previously under Mao it was prohibited. This is combined with a deliberate control over capital flows, but limiting capital exiting from Chinese economy but even more so directing capital/finance toward productive purposes. This is something the West did from the 1930s until the 1970s but something that changed dramatically under neoliberalism where banks were deregulated and allowed to issue fiat debt money/capital toward any purpose not just productive ones. Many will have forgotten that prior to the 1970s for profit banks were broadly prohibited from financing non productive investments - these being mainly housing. Since the neoliberal reforms of Thatcher and Reagan allowed for profit bankers to finance residential housing the ratio of their lending toward that purpose has steadily increased while the ratio of financing of productive purposes has steadily fallen. The key advantage China has is a political hierarchy which knows it must deliver economic progress and uses its control of capital flows to achieve that, vs a western political system that has been captured by rentseeking bankers who today issue most of the fiat toward non productive speculative purposes. The modern CCP knows if its delivery of improved economic conditions is not maintained it will likely be removed, by force. In contrast most western democracies consist of political parties subservient to the bankers and who serve the bankers interests above all else leading to the crony capitalist decline that can be seen across all western nations.
I've had similar thoughts about the incentive differences between the CCP and western political parties.
I don't attribute much of China's economic growth to CCP planning. Rather, the lifting of Mao's insane restrictions allowed for economic growth. If the CCP would further liberalize the economy, it would grow even faster.
There's no real mystery here for an Austrian. The average Chinese person is only about a quarter as productive as an average American, despite having fairly high levels of human capital. That difference is then attributed to China's inferior policy landscape.
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