Back in June, I wrote this in a post called Chinese Envy? where I asserted that the “progressives” were just a little too much in love with the land of Chairman Mao for their own good.

Obama, speaking in front of a friendly union crowd today at a Chrysler plant in Toledo, said this:

We got to have a transportation and communications network that allows our businesses to compete. We used to have the best roads, the best bridges, the best airports. In a lot of places we don’t have that anymore. If you go to China, Beijing, they’ve got a fancier airport. You go to Europe, they got fancier trains, better roads. We can’t let our infrastructure just crumble and fall apart. We’re American. We’ve got to make that investment.

What is it with Democrats and China? Not too long go, Tom Friedman of the New York Times was wishing we were China.

Love it. At least the Left is consistent. Beck followers – ignorant and gullible masses, Liberals – educated, intelligent and everyone else should just shut up and listen.  FOX News, Bush tax cuts, Tea Party, the rich – bad for America, China/communism/socialism, Mao – great and should be emulated.

Anyone who is proud of, loyal to or concerned about their country and try to do something about it – ignorant hucksters, all who display their religious faith in public – all the same, Fred Phelps=Terry Jones = Glenn Beck =Sarah Palin, except if you are a Muslim. We must not assume that radical Islamists = all of Islam. Mohammed Atta  ≠ Imam Rauf.

Amazing how tax cuts are always to blame for deficits and borrowing, never spending – because we all know that government is sacred and eternal and must be fed for the good of the collective.

Love the props for China. I guess that Obama and Tom are unfamiliar with the human toll of Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”. The Independent newspaper in the UK reported that Mao killed 45 million people in 4 years by starvation and denial of basic human rights. Guess in the eyes of a communist that was a small price to pay for good railroads and highways – “progress”.

Well, Jonah Goldberg has a great piece at NRO titled The Problem with China Envy:

Andy Stern announced recently that he’s been to the future, and it works. In this case, the future resides in China, which he says has a superior economic system. “The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model — so successful in the 20th century — is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century.”

Who’s Andy Stern? He’s just the guy who, until last year, ran the Service Employees International Union, which under his leadership spent more than any organization to get Obama elected in 2008, some $28 million. Comparatively, Stern’s influence in the Democratic party eclipses that of, say, the allegedly sinister Koch brothers or anti-tax activist Grover Norquist among Republicans. Stern himself visited the White House more than any other person during Obama’s first year in office (53 times).

Stern sees the Chinese government’s allegedly keen ability to “plan” its way to prosperity as the new model for America. It is an argument of profound asininity. China had five-year plans before it started getting rich. Under the old five-year plans, China killed tens of millions of its own people and remained mired in poverty. What made China rich wasn’t planning, it was the decision to switch to markets (albeit corrupt ones). The planners were merely in charge of distributing the wealth that markets created.

Indeed, rapid economic growth always makes government planners look like geniuses when the reality is that the planners are more like self-proclaimed rainmakers who started dancing only after it started raining. When the rain stops, which it will, they’ll have much to answer for.

Oh, and what about labor? There’s one labor union in China, and it’s run by the government. (The Nazis had pretty much the same system.) Stern doesn’t seem to care.

More intriguingly, SEIU is a huge supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which, taken at its word, is most concerned with income inequality and the back-room corruption that comes from “crony capitalism.” And Stern touts China as the model for how to fix things? China has 115 billionaires and at least 115 million people living on a dollar a day or less. Nearly all of those billionaires got rich gaming a corrupt political system.

Stern joins a long list of liberals who’ve seen China embrace authoritarian capitalism and conclude that the secret to that success had to be the authoritarianism. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, my usual whipping boy in this department, has written thousands of words rhapsodizing about his “envy” of China. President Obama himself has said he’s envious of China’s president and has touted China’s infrastructure spending as something to emulate.

If you want to copy China because its authoritarian capitalism is better than our democratic capitalism, it seems pretty obvious that what you envy is the authoritarianism. H. G. Wells had a phrase for that.