The Chinese government today is removing itself from economic life except at strategic levels, on the grounds that maximum economic activity of a certain kind is clearly beneficial in the short run to China and that regulating it other than for the purposes of keeping out competition would not be in anyone’s interests. At the same time it is an authoritarian state: censorious and repressive. It is an unfree capitalist society. The United States is not an unfree capitalist society, but the ways in which Americans conceive of the things they would allow and the things they would not allow point
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