I've some trepidation about jumping into a brawl between Brad DeLong and Jeff Faux, but given my basic sympathies for Faux's analysis of the the class pressures affecting economic policy-makers, I'm saddened to see Faux dodge the charge that he wants to "keep China a society of poor subsistence rice farmers as long as possible." For those worried about the impacts of free trade, how you move towards a fairer trade system that nevertheless allows for global economic development is an urgent moral question. Frankly, the Chinese need the jobs more than we do, and the question has to be how to make this something less than a zero-sum game.
What Faux actually asks is "Why is it that it is the responsibility of $40,000 year American working families to sacrifice their future in order to raise up the living standards of poor Chinese, when commissars turned capitalists ride around Shanghai in a different Rolls every day?" That's not actually a meaningful reply. How many commissars-turned-capitalists with interchangeable Rolls-Royces are there? If you apportioned out their holdings among all Chinese, would you meaningfully raise standards? And are the business choices and decisions of these groups actually harming the average Chinese?
