Money has emerged as the electoral trump card in the U.S. political system, and corporations have a Supreme Court–recognized right to use their considerable financial muscle to promote candidates and policies favorable to their business operations and to resist policies and shut out candidates deemed inimical to their business interests. So whether it's health reform or the stimulus package, the power of special interests in the U.S. system invariably produces either gridlock or mishmash legislation crafted to please the narrow interests of a variety of competing interests rather than the aggregated interests of the economy and society as a whole. Efficient and rational decisionmaking it's not. Nor does it appear capable of tackling long-term problems.
China is the extreme opposite, of course. It can ride roughshod over the lives of its citizens (e.g., building a dam that requires the forced relocation of 1.5 million people who have no channels through which to protest). But China's system is unlikely to give corporations the power to veto or shape government decisionmaking to suit their bottom lines at the expense of the needs of the system as a whole in the way that, to choose but one example, U.S. pharmaceutical companies are able to wield political influence to deny the government the right to negotiate drug prices for the public health system. Fukuyama seems to be warning that, in Darwinian terms, the Chinese system may be more adaptive than the land of the free.
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