George Gilder on China's economy

On August 30 George Gilder wrote

Having spent months in China in 2019 and 2020 promoting my book "Life After Google" (a best seller in China voted best foreign book published there), I spoke all over the country. I discovered to my surprise that China was freer economically than the U.S. and more entrepreneurial (and alot more interested in my book!). Scores of mayors and other local officials competed madly to foster enterprise in their localities, while our mayors and local officials tended to suppress business. The Chinese just weren't allowed to talk about politics (even at business meetings, dour communists glowered in the corner and everyone pretended to respect them). But returning to the U.S., by contrast, I found politics a leftist plague of "emergency socialism" and woke dementia. The Chinese lacked the suicidal climate cult that twisted all our policies, academics, and business plans in a green religion of net zero futilities, windmill totem poles and druidical sun henges. Our great strengths were avoidance of the one-child mania, though we compensated by competing with the Chinese in Covid hysteria and authoritarianism. Our remedy was giant tech ventures, Musk, and Trump, while the Chinese are still apparently ensnared by Xi Jinping.