It?s always disturbing to read an American businessperson singing the praises of an autocratic regime, as investor Wilbur Ross does in a Bloomberg Business Week interview with Charlie Rose:
Does manufacturing in the U.S. have a future?
I think it does. What I’m worried about is R&D. You have to have new technologies. We think of China as a polluter. Let me tell you, China is the leader in wind power technology. They already are producing 40 percent of all the wind turbines in the world and exporting 80 percent of those. And they did it in typical Chinese fashion. They ordered that the power grid must take alternative power before it can take anything else. Second, it must do it under long-term contracts, and third, it must do it at a big premium price. So they managed to create a huge domestic market, and now they’re beaming in on the export. That’s how you have an industrial policy.
One almost expects Ross to have said, ?I?ve seen the future, and it works.? That was (a slight reworking of) muckraker Lincoln Steffens? line about the Soviet Union in 1921.
To learn the dangers associated with romanticizing central planning, read The Road to Serfdom.
