The free market economy is supposed to be one of the pillars of American society. Yet in the past decade we have seen successive US administrations continuously interfere with the market.
Even to this day, under the new Biden regime, the US is proving to be unceasing in its hypocrisy.
From bailing out the banks to trade tariffs, the US under Obama, Trump and now Biden has ensured that the vagaries of the market do not allow themselves to run their full course.
Understandably for many scholars this has signalled the collapse of capitalism.
Yet the latest moves by the Biden administration, together with the US Congress, shows that the US does not practice what it preaches.
It realises that if it implements what it believes then other countries would certainly have gained much more favourable outcomes from the market.
Take for example the latest salvo to the market from the US Congress, the US Strategic Competition Act. Following Trump’s trade tariffs, this piece of legislation seeks to curtail the outcomes of programmes such as the Belt and Road Initiative and provides a budget of $300 million per annum to “counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally”.
Among others, American scholars themselves have suggested that the act not only undermines fundamental principles of US society but also, according to someone like Michael D Swaine from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, “epitomises the worst errors of the new Washington ‘consensus’ on what a rising China supposedly means for the United States and the world”.
Even worse still, the act, again according to Swaine, is “almost exclusively zero-sum (and in some instances dangerous) policy recommendations”.
At the same time, the Endless Frontier Act, although renamed now, provides for $110 billion ostensibly to develop technological research but really to cut at China’s agility in the market.
Despite a Democrat being in the Oval Office, the international community is being fast pushed, once again, into the bipolar days of the Cold War.
State sovereignty, long a principle of international relations, is being undermined and in the case of China especially in regards to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Xinjiang.
Africans should know that if the US and its allies can undermine China and her sovereignty it will no doubt persist in undermining our sovereignty and insist in interfering with the global market as well.
The free market economy is dead. In fact, some would even argue that it never existed and neither has it been the reason for China’s ascent and resilience.
If anything, China has been able to become the world’s largest manufacturing country and the second largest economy in the world precisely because it has planned and deliberately directed the market.
Yet if the US is going to preach free market economics, it must surely take the lead in practising it.
Investing in specific industries and sectors is all fair and well but to intervene deliberately so as to produce specific outcomes, as the Strategic Competition Act and the Endless Frontier Act attempt to do, contradicts the doctrine of a free market economy.
For Deng Xiaoping it was not necessary whether the cat was black or white. What was important for him was that the cat knew exactly what it was meant to do and, if needs be, directed to doing its job in catching the mouse.
It would certainly have been unacceptable if the cat started eating the chickens. Which is precisely why an unfettered market is doomed in the first place.
* Wesley Seale has a PhD in international relations.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of IOL and Independent Media.