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- cross-posted to:
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Despite the US’s economic success, income inequality remains breathtaking. But this is no glitch – it’s the system
The Chinese did rather well in the age of globalization. In 1990, 943 million people there lived on less than $3 a day measured in 2021 dollars – 83% of the population, according to the World Bank. By 2019, the number was brought down to zero. Unfortunately, the United States was not as successful. More than 4 million Americans – 1.25% of the population – must make ends meet with less than $3 a day, more than three times as many as 35 years ago.
The data is not super consistent with the narrative of the US’s inexorable success. Sure, American productivity has zoomed ahead of that of its European peers. Only a handful of countries manage to produce more stuff per hour of work. And artificial intelligence now promises to put the United States that much further ahead.
This is not to congratulate China for its authoritarian government, for its repression of minorities or for the iron fist it deploys against any form of dissent. But it merits pondering how this undemocratic government could successfully slash its poverty rate when the richest and oldest democracy in the world wouldn’t.
No, see, what you’re doing is making a No True Scotsman argument. Nothing is communism to you unless it achieves the pristine results dictated by the ideal, so any actual attempt that fails, you dismiss as “not communism,” rather than admit that communism is a flawed system that has always produced bad results at scale.
People say this forgetting that ‘Scotsman’ has a specific definition and the analogy of the No True Scotsman does not involve someone just calling themselves Scottish.
What you’re doing is seeing me call myself a Scotsman, seeing someone else say I have no Scottish heritage and have never been to Scotland, and you’re saying to the second person “No True Scotsman!”
If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it calling itself a shark doesn’t magically make it a Scotsman.
Or do you think the Nazis were socialists?
So you would say the United States is a Democracy?
No, it’s a republic.
No, they call it a Democracy. So, from your perspective it must be a democracy
That’s not a counter argument. “They” don’t call China a communist state; China does. Nowhere does the United States call itself a straight democracy. It refers to itself as a republic.