- Dan Blumenthal on Xi’s visit: ‘Washington would do well to remember that it too has leverage. The Chinese economy is struggling. Deflation had persisted for 10 straight quarters, finally lifting only due to rising global energy costs; property investment has collapsed by nearly 44 percent; and youth unemployment has hit nearly 17 percent. On its current trajectory, China is not catching the US—it’s leaning more heavily on trade surpluses, having posted a record trade surplus exceeding $1 trillion in 2025. Beijing’s dependence on foreign markets absorbing its surplus is a source of American leverage if Trump coordinates market closures and supply-chain cutoffs with Beijing’s other big markets.’
- Geoff Shullenberger, Behind MAGA’s Anti-Colonialist Turn, via Compact
- A vision of “market socialism” from Beggs, Burgis, and Sunkara, via Compact: ‘Their version of market socialism combines employee-owned firms with a large public sector that provides health, education, many care services, public banks, and regulatory agencies. The employee-owned firms would compete on the market to provide consumers with products and many of those would be sold in stores that would also be collectively owned by their employees. Wage rates for different industries would be set by a national wage board, and wages could be supplemented with dividends as firms distribute profits to their members. In larger firms, employees would elect representatives to manage the firm while smaller firms could engage in collective democratic decision-making.
‘The authors go into considerable detail about the organization of these employee-owned firms to avoid some of the historic difficulties that employee cooperatives have encountered. Most new investments that firms undertake would be financed by loans from a large network of public banks. Interest rates would be more favorable when projects were good for the environment or could lift up a less prosperous region. A central bank would continue to manage interest rates to avoid the economy overheating or sliding into recession.’ - Nice touch at the end! Chris Scalia: ‘Now that I think of it, the next time I address one of my boys, I think I’m going to call him . . . bruh or dude or anything but buddy!’
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