I thought I found the sure winner of the counter-tweet of the year back in February when @jmhorp debunked a silly and illiterate tweet from @ATLCWorker. The inescapable conclusion from that exchange was that capitalism is the best recipe for fighting poverty.
But now we have another counter-tweet that is equally devastating.
In response to an inane tweet by @ProudSocialist about the supposed superiority of China’s economic policy, @cafreiman shows that living standards in America are more than five times higher (similar to data I shared last year).
The obvious moral of the story is that a mostly free economy (the U.S. is ranked #5 for economic liberty) produces better results than a mostly unfree economy (China is ranked #104).
By the way, I’m not being jingoistic about America. I write all the time about bad policies emanating from Washington. And I’m definitely worried about the erosion of economic liberty in the United States (since 2000, the U.S. score has declined from 8.83 to 8.09).
Nor am I trying to dunk on China since one of the most positive economic developments of my lifetime has been how partial economic reform in that country lifted hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
But while its great that China did some liberalization (its score increased from 4.05 in 1990 to 6.14 today), there’s still far too much government intervention.
The bottom line is that China needs more economic liberty, especially if it wants to be a rich country. And if the United States wants to remain a rich country, it needs to make sure economic liberty doesn’t keep falling.
It’s almost as if there’s a recipe for economic success.
P.S. Previous “counter-tweets of the year” can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
