Melting Pot Meets Great Wall

Thomas Friedman:

Walking through the Olympic Village the other day, here’s what struck me most: the Russian team all looks Russian; the African team all looks African; the Chinese team all looks Chinese; and the American team looks like all of them.

I had a similar thought watching some of the team sports this Olympic season. It is one of America's greatest strengths. Sadly, some people don't seem to agree:

It is amazing that with our Noah’s Ark of an Olympic team doing so well “that at the same time you have this rising call in America to restrict immigration,” said Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. “Some people want to choke off the very thing that makes us strong and unique.”

Friedman continues on to conclude a few things I disagree with:

That said, there are some things we could learn from China, namely the ability to focus on big, long-term, nation-building goals and see them through. A Chinese academic friend tells me that the success of the Olympics is already prompting some high officials to argue that only a strong, top-down, Communist Party-led China could have organized the stunning building projects around these Olympics and the focused performance of so many different Chinese athletes. For instance, the Chinese have no tradition of rowing teams, but at these Games, out of nowhere, Beijing fielded a women’s quadruple sculls crew that won China’s first Olympic gold medal in rowing.

The lesson for us is surely not that we need authoritarian government. The lesson is that we need to make our democracy work better. The American men’s basketball team did poorly in the last Olympics because it could not play as a team. So our stars were beaten by inferior players with better teamwork. Our basketball team learned its lesson.

While I would agree there are some things Americans could learn about teamwork from our Chinese counterparts (I often thought this while working for the Japanese), that's a very different conclusion from concluding the American government could learn a lot from the Chinese government.

The Great Wall is an apt analogy for China. It reflects the ability of a centralized authority to concentrate resources on a great work that can impress anyone who sees it. Unfortunately, you don't get a chance to see what people could have done had they put their resources towards that large public work. (Read Bastiat's essay That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen for more on this.)

Communism and a powerful centralized government can do some things well. The Soviets developed a space program, a large military, brilliant mathematicians and metallurgists, great athletes, etc. Similarly, China certainly has put on an impressive show to the rest of the world (although not without its hidden problems) for this Olympic season. The question is at what cost?

In contrast, a decentralized government and a free people does most of these things just as well and much, much more. The American system of liberty in contrast to the Chinese system of communism promotes a flourishing of its people. When people are free to live their lives as they choose, they do the things that are important to them rather than what's important to their political leaders.

In China's system, a few, powerful elite in positions of authority choose the people and projects they want to succeed. These successes may often can compete (sometimes exceeding) with the best that freedom can produce. The problem is what about the rest? Those not "chosen" suffer in terms of wide-spread poverty, oppression of political rights (including freedom of religion, freedom of the press, the right to assemble, free speech, etc.), an average standard of living only a fraction of that in America, and a systematic deception by their government to try to hide these problems. I'd be willing to put up with America losing a few basketball games so that I wouldn't have to put up with all of this.

Congress has gotten worse. Our democracy feels increasingly paralyzed because collaboration in Washington has become nearly impossible — whether because of money, gerrymandering, a 24-hour-news cycle or the permanent presidential campaign. And as a result, our ability to focus America’s incredible bottom-up energies — outside of sports — has diminished. You see it in our crumbling infrastructure and inability to shape a real energy program. China feels focused. We feel distracted.

I think Friedman gets this wrong. China feels controlled. We feel free.