美国民主党议员 B Sanders 夸中国让几亿人脫贫。但是贫富悬殊太吓人了。

可是他一直主张美国多一点社会主义，少一点资本主义。阻力巨大。

华尔街日报的评论。

Sanders Praises Communist Capitalism.

Yes, China lifted millions out of poverty—by moving away from socialism.

By By Joshua Muravchik, Sept. 10, 2019.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s praise for the government of China should raise eyebrows, and not only for the obvious reasons. His assessment of the Chinese economy knocks the pins out from under his political and economic philosophy.

In an interview last month with the Hill, Mr. Sanders conceded that China “is moving unfortunately in a more authoritarian way in a number of directions.” He then asserted that “what we have to say about China, in fairness to China and its leadership, is . . . they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization.”

Unlike most of Mr. Sanders’s past words of praise for communist regimes—for Cuba’s health-care and education systems, the Soviet Union’s “youth programs” and “cultural programs,” and Nicaragua’s empowerment of “the poor people”—Mr. Sanders’s comment about China has a basis in fact. According to the World Bank, 88% of Chinese lived on less than $1.90 a day in 1981. Today less than 1% do. (These figures are in 2011 dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity.)

Yet that success didn’t come from socialism. It’s a product of China’s move away from socialism. And it came at the cost—at least by Mr. Sanders’s usual lights—of heightened inequality. A 2018 International Monetary Fund working paper reports that “China has moved from being a moderately unequal country in 1990 to being one of the most unequal countries.” The IMF dates that trend to 1980, shortly after Beijing began its capitalist experiment.

At home, Mr. Sanders urges a “political revolution” and a “wholesale transformation of our society” from capitalism to socialism—the reverse of what China did 40 years ago. He burns with hostility for capitalists. We must “no longer tolerate the greed of Wall Street, corporate America and the billionaire class,” he rails.

Yet Mr. Sanders’s accurate observation about China’s record in ending poverty ought to give him pause. Mao Zedong’s China was the apotheosis of class warfare and of formal equality. Millions were slaughtered as “class enemies,” and, everyone wore drab tunics and shared poverty (except Mao himself, who lived like royalty with a few of his cohorts). With Mao gone, Deng Xiaoping called an end to the class war.

“To get rich is glorious” became the watchword. According to Forbes, China has more billionaires (in U.S. dollar terms) than any other country except the U.S., and is minting new ones far faster. At the beginning of this century, Forbes found only one in China. Today it counts more than 300.

No doubt Mr. Sanders would decry that, but is it too high a price to pay for a process that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty? This question points to the core difference between socialism, which focuses on how to distribute wealth, and capitalism, which is concerned primarily with how to produce it. China’s experience teaches anew that the latter is more important than the former, for the poor as well as the rich. Mr. Sanders admires China for bringing its population the material benefits of capitalism. Why would he want to saddle his own countrymen with socialism?