Apple in China – Patrick McGee -- 864 pages plus notes and index
Patrick McGee's book, Apple in China, published in May of 2025, provides a comprehensive explanation of how three different forces combined to make Apple one of the largest corporations in the world in terms of market capitalization. The sub-title of the book, The Capture of the World's Greatest Company, hints at a darker consequence of Apple's "success" but understates the true impact. The thesis of the book appears early on in the introductory chapter on page 8.
The prevailing Western narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow. The go-to story of the past two decades has been about the tedium of assembling Apple products – a tail of low wages, underage employees, sixteen-hour workdays, suicides at Foxconn, and accusations of forced Uighur labor. This narrative isn't wrong, but it misses the biggest piece of the puzzle: It's not merely that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it's that Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple. (page 8)
McGee's thesis itself is correct as far as it goes but it doesn't go far enough. This isn't a strategy China cooked up to capture Apple, this is a strategy China devised and consistently executed from the beginning to acquire manufacturing expertise, foster self-reliance and counter economic threats from industrialized democracies anywhere on the planet. China's strategy and its application are not limited to trendy, high-margin consumer electronics goods. They apply to nearly every segment of industrial manufacturing.
For the most part, McGee's exposition in Apple in China covers events in sequential order focusing on Apple's near-bankruptcy prior to Steve Jobs rejoining the company through to the present. However, considering McGee's insights against the wider picture of industrial competition worldwide, it is worth summarizing the points in the book along the following lines:
- Apple's unique history corporate culture
- China's peculiar legal and economic federalism
- American political and economic arrogance
With background provided in this order, it will become apparent why Apple was simply the first target and uniquely suited for exploitation and uniquely valuable to China's strategy.
Apple's Unique History and Corporate Culture
Apple's operations in China began in 2003 when demand for the original iPod finally grew enough to exhaust capacity at one of its manufacturing outsources in Taiwan and they decided to open a plant in China. By that point, prior management and financial struggles within Apple had laid much of the groundwork for senior leaders to become "addicted" to outsourcing even though it represented a complete reversal of Apple's historical preferences.
The first dynamic unique to Apple and its history and culture could be summarized as Apple's tendency to hire the best, then ignore them.
Since its inception in 1976, Apple created a series of trailblazing products never previously seen in the electronics industry. While each involved "consumer electronics" level technologies, those technologies were evolving so rapidly that each iteration – the personal computer (the Apple ][), affordable laser printers for desktop publishing and graphic design work (the Laserwriter), an intuitive, functional, stylish digital music player (the iPod) and of course the modern smartphone (the iPhone) – all required strategies for supply chain management, manufacturing, assembly, distribution and retailing that were completely "outside the box" of prior generations of expertise.
In each of these iterations, Apple encountered problems meeting demand and responded by hiring people from other companies with backgrounds and track records for innovation in these areas. Nearly to a person, every one of these hires was shocked to find on their start date that no one in the company gave them direction on what the company wanted done or even provided a summary of management's understanding of the problem(s) to be solved. We hired YOU to tell US what we should do! Get busy! The new exec was simply handed the reins and given carte blanche to do whatever they felt was required.
Over its history, Apple's ability to identify and recruit world-class leadership for these firefighting roles at critical points has proven to be nearly infallible. At many crucial points in that history, a new hire would be dropped off amid great technical or financial peril without so much as a map and compass. The new hire would assess the situation, spot a crippling constraint, then synthesize a new design or tactic to solve the problem. At each point, the solution would catch up to the problems, eliminate them and result in predictable operations and financial improvements in six to twelve months and healthy profits afterwards.
Apple leadership in Cupertino did this repeatedly, training executive leaders in design, manufacturing, supply chain management, marketing and regional geopolitics and allowing them to operate within their sphere with virtually no interference or micromanagement whatsoever. As long as they produced the desired numbers, these top leaders had tremendous autonomy.
Curiously however, despite this stable of executives with proven world-class insight into their particular field, Apple leadership in Cupertino would also consistently IGNORE these leaders when they warned of looming problems. These problems might present in several ways. An outsourcing strategy that had scaled for multiple years but was reaching some other uncontrollable upper limit. A strategy for mitigating some political tension with a regional or national government negotiated years prior that had been altered by changes in government leadership. Whatever the trigger, Apple's leadership in Cupertino had a consistent response – as long as a unit was meeting current targets, Cupertino leadership didn't want to hear and often could not understand any lurking problems inside that black box. Senior leadership was thus ignoring some of the best management talent on the planet who were screaming at them ICEBERG!
Curiously, the case can be made that Apple's eventual eagerness to embrace outsourcing stemmed from an original ethos within the company to NOT outsource. That ethos dated back to the Apple ][ computer. Apple's first computer was designed by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak not only had a genius for electronic design and optimization of circuitry, he also understood that success of the product required its packaging to allow owners to easily open the chassis and replace parts at will. This expanded the universe of businesses who would be capable of creating accessories for the device which widened its popularity. Steve Jobs also applied his aesthetic sensibility to the design by ensuring the Apple looked like a family friendly appliance instead of a delicate, scientific lab device but the minimal chip set and open design were the key drivers in the Apple's iconic physical appearance.
Apple wanted to position the Apple ][ as a reliable product and felt the best way to ensure quality was to control the manufacturing of the boards and final assembly in its own factories. As volumes ramped up, Apple evolved the design to consolidate chips to simplify manufacturing and support more automation, allowing it to keep up with growing volume while lowering costs. This strategy remained consistent with Apple through the mid 1990s. For example, the Macintosh Iici made between 1989 and 1993 included a total of 29 chips on the motherboard and the entire chassis could be taken apart by removing two screws. Apple did open factories in Mexico and Ireland but the buildings and equipment remained Apple-owned.
This strategy did result in conflict within the company as Jobs became focused on development of the Macintosh and began insisting on devoting manufacturing capacity to its more complex physical design. However, most of that conflict vanished when Jobs was fired in 1985. From that point through 1997, Apple's overall strategy emphasized "human factors" design much like Jobs insisted but in his absence, that overall strategy always leaned towards manufacturability and ease of assembly in any tie-breaking scenario where choices had to be made.
When Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, Apple was near bankruptcy and the Macintosh product line was becoming stagnant due to a failed effort to modernize its System 7 operating system. Jobs began dealing directly with its Industrial Design team in creating a new Macintosh form factor that would generate some cash flow to allow Apple to complete an OS redesign and catch up to current Windows functionality. With Jobs as CEO, any debates between prioritizing aesthetics versus ease-of-manufacturing vanished at that point and the aesthetic choices Jobs made for the iMac required injection molding capabilities Apple did not have in house.
It's worth noting that Apple's decision to jettison its own factories wasn't simply because Jobs and the Industrial Design team under Jonathan Ive came up with challenges every three to four years that exceeded in-house capabilities. Jobs would dictate changes to existing products that would require retooling of existing processes only months after their original launch. At that point, it became apparent Apple couldn't afford to retool its own factories while keeping up with a more active product pipeline. It also became apparent that Apple couldn't afford to fall back to higher amounts of manual labor to assemble components whose designs thwarted automation. The quantity of labor required at American (or even Mexican or Irish) rates was cost prohibitive.
By roughly 2002, the faster pace of obsolescence of tooling for specific models and vastly higher amounts of human labor required for assembly led Apple to flip its strategy completely. Previously, Apple had focused on what some might have viewed as more simple, boring designs that lent themselves to higher degrees of automation to reduce costs. Now, Apple was focused on delivering "elegant" products with seemingly impossible physical designs that required much higher levels of manual labor – none of which could be afforded unless done in Asia at labor rates that were one tenth those of American factory workers.
To get an idea of the type of labor that is NOT automated with Apple products, search YouTube for videos where people attempt to take apart an iMac desktop, MacBook laptop, iPod or iPhone to repair it. Apple doesn't CARE that the process is difficult and time consuming because the people doing that work do that ONE THING all day for up to twelve hours and earn maybe $3 to $5 dollars per hour (wages have gone up since the early 2000s for most Chinese workers).
China's Peculiar Legal and Economic Federalism
A second category of factors that drove the "capture" discussed in the book involves the peculiar forms of legal and economic federalism within China. After Deng Xiaoping took over leadership of China in the 1970s, China adopted a form of communism that was top-down in its establishment of priorities and objectives by a central committee but left most of the implementation details to provincial governments. Provincial leaders do NOT want to miss targets so they compete heavily against each other for projects that can boost numbers that help them achieve their goals. If a goal is set to add 200,000 factory jobs in five years, a province will offer millions (billions) in subsidies for roads, residential housing and utilities to attract Chinese or foreign firms into their province.
Americans hearing of this arrangement and incentives can easily spot similarities to problems in America with corporations pitting cities and states against each other to give away the biggest tax breaks to the company for building a new plant or staying in place. This is a definite problem in America that's been taking place since the 1980s and often involves millions of dollars per negotiation. In China, this dynamic has been going on since the 1980s as well but in the mid-1990s, the Chinese government began leveraging this strategy at billion dollar scales and has continued doing so through to the present. This represents a level of incentives unlike anything seen in any industrial democracy. Apple was one of many firms experiencing the gravitational attraction of that much money sloshing around attempting to entice businesses to move work to China.
Another aspect of China's unique "federalism" is reflected in the realities of inter-province travel. Technically, China doesn't require citizens of one province to obtain a work visa for another province but customs in China still impose another form of friction. In China, the payment of government benefits and delivery of social services is tied to a citizen's registered place of origin and tracked in a system (a process, really) referred to as hukou. From a western perspective, this hukou process combines functional elements of a birth certificate, a Social Security Number and a subtle but insidious government-reinforced social and economic caste system. Citizens can visit other cities in other provinces but living away from one's "origin" requires registering in the new city's hukou system and registering with local police who are not required to grant a registration.
As China set ambitious industrialization goals beginning in the 1990s, VAST numbers of people needed to be relocated from interior rural regions of the countries to the emerging mega-cities established for industrialization hubs. That shuffling of humanity from rural to urban areas coupled with this hukou system essentially created a permanent underclass that, as of 2025, is estimated to be around TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILLION Chinese. For those Chinese, their "career" choice is pretty much limited to either a) remaining in a giant megacity with an employer imposing inhumane factory work conditions or b) returning to relative poverty in their home of origin.
The size of constraints imposed upon this ENORMOUS collection of marginalized workers explains why labor conditions aren't improving much in China. McGee notes in the book that stories that came out around 2012 regarding extreme work hours led Apple to demand more data regarding work hours and schedules from suppliers to avoid 12+ hour days or 80+ hour weeks, etc. The data was gathered for a year or so, numbers improved (went down) for a while, then seemed to flat-line. When Apple operations managers in China investigated why the numbers stopped improving, they were essentially told, "when you give us two conflicting impossible goals, we're going to choose to meet the goal that makes us the most money." Apple didn't alter its production goals or expected cost pricing. Apple simply stopped distributing the report internally and stopped paying any attention to work hour abuses.
American Political and Economic Arrogance
A key insight McGee raises in the book is that his story may be based upon Apple as a company but there are wider factors at work in America that also made this "capture" possible. These factors boil down to political and economic arrogance of American politicians, business managers and academics.
China's drive towards industrialization started with Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s, became rocket fueled within China in the mid 1990s but was further aided by America's decision to grant China most favored nation status in 2000 at the end of the Clinton Administration. At the time in 2000, American politicians were all smiles. The Soviet Union collapsed ten years before, internet technology was fueling prosperity no one could imagine or foresee ending and the federal government was running a budget surplus. Politicians, businesses and arm-chair historians in America were confident that expanding trade with China would expose Chinese communism to the positive corrosive force of capitalism which would inevitably lead to democracy. How are you going to hold down the billion once they get their hands on American blue jeans and fast food chains? That was the overall vibe at the time.
In hindsight from 2025, it is clear that Americans were totally delusional at that time. But even at that time, there were zero facts in evidence for Americans to make those assumptions. The same Chinese leader that opened the country for business, Deng Xiaoping, also ordered the brutal crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 that killed thousands. When Xiaoping ceded power in 1989 to Jiang Zemin, Zemin continued Xiaoping's policies that emphasized economic growth and self-sufficiency while limiting democracy and human rights.
The final element of American arrogance and ignorance that clouded the judgment of policymakers and business leaders alike was a cult-like belief in the "efficient market hypothesis." The "efficient market" hypothesis originated in 1970 but grew to dominate economic and business theory taught in business schools throughout America. The key to its popularity is that it invented a logical-sounding framework to explain why corporations should be free to focus solely on increasing stock prices at the expense of pretty much any other consideration.
According to the efficient market hypothesis, the market of actual / potential stock buyers was collectively so efficient at evaluating a company's future economic cash flows and risks that stock prices perfectly reflected a company's value. The implication was that ANYTHING a company did to increase that stock price meant that "efficient market" thought the company did something of value to increase that price and the market's judgment included all negative outcomes and externalities. If the stock price went up, the company's "value" truly did go up. No need to overthink it. Another manifestation of Adam Smith's invisible hand.
America emerged from World War II as the only intact industrialized democracy. It had invested in manufacturing capacity for four years that produced much of the supplies for the western forces and much of that brand new capital was rapidly converted to civilian production. American businesses enjoyed nearly twenty five years (from 1946 to 1970) of unequaled capacity and efficiency. By 1970 however, American business had grown complacent. Relatively little had been invested since the end of WWII and businesses just milked these quarter century old assets for profits. By the 1970s, foreign countries began leapfrogging America's older technologies and quality and productivity began to catch up and exceed that of America.
By the 1980s, leaders of those grossly inefficient businesses, mentally armed with efficient market theory, assumed costs could be reduced and profits increased by shifting manufacturing to foreign countries with labor costs often one tenth those of US workers. Those same leaders convinced themselves that as long as the "mental work" – the design work – continued to be done in-house, the grunt work – actual stamping / machining / assembly – could be outsourced to trained monkeys and the company would retain control of its intellectual property, profitability and fate. Executives saw their stock prices go up in response to reducing labor costs and, thoroughly brainwashed by efficient market hypothesis thinking, convinced themselves this was progress.
Apple in its 2.0 Jobs-led incarnation believed this in its entirety. Apple wasn't the only American firm that believed this fairy tale but Apple's unique (irrational?) fixation on "industrial design" aesthetics had a unique impact on China as Apple outsourced manufacturing. Stated bluntly, because of its fixation on "cool but impossible" physical human factors, Steve Jobs and Apple were a pain in the ass for manufacturing firms to deal with. However, Apple's product evolution cycle essentially meant that being an Apple partner would always stress a firm with the most difficult "use case" imaginable before ANY other company would present a need for that use case. Any firm that could deliver that capability for Apple would then have it in their toolkit to use for any other competitor or to use in other product sectors.
This feedback loop between all of these design, labor, political and economic forces is the essence of the book.
The Apple Squeeze
One of the key chapters of the book that ties all of these destructive economic and political forces together is entitled The Apple Squeeze. The author starts the chapter by recapping a stunning business statistic that has held true since someone first crunched the numbers in 2015.
The most insane statistic about Apple's business is this: The iPhone accounts for fewer than 20 percent of smartphones sold around the world, yet it routinely boasts more than 80 percent of industry profits. In no other market does a minority player command this kind of dominance…
This statistic reflects a unique combination of forces that collectively counteract forces that would normally yield a positive (versus negative) correlation between market share measured in UNITS and market share measured in REVENUE. If hundreds of years of economic theory are held to remain true, this can only happen if other forces and numbers are being ignored or overlooked. McGee makes it clear that Apple should have been able to spot the disconnect.
In the narrative that describes the start of Tim Cook's tenure at Apple in the late 1990s, the book summarizes a key tactic Cook applied in all contract negotiations with vendors:
Cook was fond of teaching colleagues to "be aggressive and unreasonable" when negotiating with suppliers. Max Paley, a vice president of graphics at the time, recalls not really knowing what this meant. Cook would say in a calm, deliberative cadence: "Don't… ever… be… afraid… to… be… unreasonable." What did that mean? Was cook saying to be a jerk? Paley wasn't sure, but he later grew to understand and respect it. "What he was really saying as that it's a typical thing for people – even in business negotiations with a supplier – to try to figure out: What's a reasonable thing to ask them? What they are likely to be able to do?" Paley says. "Whereas he was kinda saying, 'You have no clue. You have no idea what the supplier might actually be capable of. So don't be afraid to ask for the moon. Ask for everything you want. Ask for everything you need. If they can't do it, they'll say no.'"
This is a perfectly valid tactic to adopt in negotiations with third parties and it reflected Apple's internal corporate culture to a tee so Cook was just the newest addition to the ranks using this in routine operations. However, Apple leaders failed to ponder a crucial corollary to this maxim… If you keep asking for terms you KNOW are unreasonable and your partner keeps accepting them, there's a reason for it.
Apple executives all drank the Apple Kool-Aid and assumed that vendors delivering the next impossible project to meet Apple's latest set of unreasonable needs were doing so because of some combination of the following reasons:
- Apple's internal technical prowess was actually correct and the impossible task WAS possible
- Apple's "vision" was so inspiring even for its vendors that it was able to "will" the impossible into the possible (a concept famously termed the "Steve Jobs reality distortion field" during Jobs' tenure)
- Apple's operational leaders simply browbeat its vendors to deliver Apple's impossible result
- Apple leadership assumed the vendor was eating out-sized costs and risks for the mere privilege of being able to say they worked with Apple as a means of attracting business from competitors
The last bullet above HAS actually been a strong motivation for all of the vendors that have been sucked into the Apple ecosystem over time. However, missing from the understanding of Apple leadership was the possibility that Apple's own calculation of "unreasonableness" was drastically undervaluing an economic benefit that was being delivered to the vendor. And an expert in supply chains and procurement contracting like Tim Cook should have been able to spot this problem.
Think about it in these terms. You've negotiated with a vendor year after year after year. In each new negotiation, you put your "unreasonable ask" on the table as you've been brainwashed to do. And each time, the vendor accepts the proposal with virtually no pushback. Yet you are confident you are coming out on the winning side year after year. What's likely happening? It's likely there are other financial and strategic implications of the deal that you are ignoring that your vendor is pricing into their decision to accept, push back or reject. If you are unaware of that hidden factor, YOU are not making a fully informed decision when signing the deal.
Another example… Imagine you're a world-famous, extremely wealthy investor and you like to buy a new car every year. No Camry or Altima for you. A Range Rover, Ferrari, or Porsche every time. Following the Cook rule, each time you walk into WheelsRUs, you low-ball your offer by $30,000 or so to test the dealer's markup on the vehicles. Yet every year, the dealer takes your first offer. How much are you really paying for the car?
If the dealer is willing to lose $30,000 to you every year, it COULD be that they are bragging around town to other potential customers that they are your preferred car dealer to try to land sales with other rich buyers. But it could ALSO be that the dealer is installing a GPS tracker in your car that can track your whereabouts 24x7 and selling that insight to crooked investors who are using it to track who you meet as part of your business deals so they can front-run your deals for millions of dollars, potentially putting those business deals at risk.
This is what was happening in Apple's dealings with its vendors. The book quotes numerous employees at different vendors who all basically said the same thing – we hate working for Apple but doing so builds skills and adds equipment to our factories that positions us to do exactly the same thing for every other company. Engineers at these vendors developed such high levels of expertise in the materials and techniques Apple's products were driving that possession of the know-how has shifted to being nearly 100% in the heads of the vendors. Even if Apple wanted to build a factory in India or back in America, APPLE engineers would be unable to train a team of engineers on the manufacturing of its products. That DNA is not present within Apple in sufficient quantities to support plants anywhere but China.
The key point in McGee's book is that the dynamic forces that industry experts call the "Apple Squeeze" first appear on paper to have created a consumer electronics world where Apple can extract eighty percent of an entire industry's PROFITS from only twenty percent of its VOLUME leaving its competitors to fight over crumbs. In reality, they have also created a dynamic that has transferred nearly one hundred percent of the know-how and actual physical capabilities required for these products into China nearly exclusively and China – and not just Chinese companies but China the country -- is now capable of using those resources in any way it chooses.
As proof of this, McGee describes the release of the iPhone X which was released in 2018 and featured a novel "infinity edge" screen that gave Apple phones a unique feature no other phones had. At least, for five months, at which point competing phones from Huawei and other Chinese makes were released with nearly IDENTICAL physical attributes and features, all made in the same factories as the iPhoneX. By 2019, Huawei began outselling Apple in China by a three to one ratio. McGee points out the only event that saved Apple was a decision by President Trump at the time to push for a ban on all Huawei products in the US – ostensibly because of concerns about security back-doors in their gear targeted at telecommunications providers for their backbone networks. However, what truly halted Huawei in its tracks was a ban imposed on exports of all 5G chips to Huawei. Since Huawei made both cellular phones and cellular network equipment, this instantly crushed Huawei's ability to deliver consumer and provider gear compatible with the newest cellular network technologies being deployed worldwide.
One Technical Aside
McGee's narrative references one challenge Apple faced with sales in China that created a ripple effect few consumers understand but experience every day. This effect is a good illustration of how a firm doing business in a market whose sheer size creates its own economic weather can lead to undesirable and unavoidable side effects in unexpected ways.
Every consumer is familiar with the use of unique serial numbers being assigned to complex products with dozens / hundreds / thousands of parts. Manufacturers can track lot numbers of parts used each day and map them to the serial number of any final product that took on a part from any given lot. This helps quality control and diagnosis of problems after the product is in the hands of the customer.
Most consumers are now becoming aware of the concept of PART serialization. Complex products such as cars and computers have had serial numbers on individual PARTS for decades but in the last ten years, computing power in the final product has been leveraged to scan the operating product for all the serial numbers of all of these critical parts and STOP the device from functioning or limit its operations if any part-level serial number detected doesn't match the part serial number originally detected during assembly at the factory.
Customers HATE part serialization because it can limit their ability to fix or upgrade devices on their own, requiring them instead to use "factory-authorized" repair channels and pay more for the privilege of doing something they should be able to do themselves.
McGee points out in the book that Apple's adoption of part serialization was primarily due to wholesale fraud it experienced with the iPhone in China. Chinese firms became so adept at counterfeiting iPhones down to the shrink-wrapped packaging that even Apple Store employees couldn't differentiate fakes from genuine units. Chinese buyers would bring fake iPhones to Apple stores due to problems and Apple would realize the phone was counterfeit but using a cloned serial number from a real phone. Adopting parts serialization made it easier to detect forged device serial numbers. If a device with SERIAL111 left the factory mapped to PARTA111, PARTB111 and PARTC111 but that SERIAL111 identifier later showed up during activation mapped to PARTA222, PARTB222, PARTC222, that unit was counterfeit and any attempt to activate it or honor repair work would be rejected.
In that light, it's not that Apple or similar manufacturers adopting this tactic are specifically doing so just to annoy their customers and limit the ability to repair / replace components, but the net effect is the same. It's an inevitable result when a country with a billion potential buyers doesn't protect intellectual property and allows its companies to blatantly clone proprietary designs.
A Marshall Plan for America
The real takeaway from Apple in China is that the decimation of domestic electronics manufacturing within the US is just a microcosm of a larger strategic failure in business and politics that has created identical impacts across every manufacturing sector. As American business executives have rewarded themselves more lavishly over the decades, they have become more deluded about where value is added in the design, manufacturing, distribution and retailing of products. They have minimized investment in plant and equipment and relied upon open trade to shift work to regions paying ten to fifteen percent of livable American wages and supported cuts in public education and government funded research that form the basis for future innovation. All to boost the next quarter's profits and lower their personal taxes.
Apple has made the point that the resources and expertise they require to deliver their inspired products simply do not exist in America. But they didn't exist in China, either. McGee makes the point that Apple invested BILLIONS of dollars over decades CREATING those skills in another country. Specifically, by 2015, Apple was investing $55 billion PER YEAR in China. In contrast, the much-vaunted CHIPS act passed in 2022 to attempt to resurrect chip fabrication within the US committed the US government to spending $52 billion over FOUR years. As another comparison, the US spent $13 billion -- $172 billion in 2025 dollars -- between 1948 and 1952 helping to rebuild thirteen countries across Western Europe after World War II under the Marshall Plan.
The real takeaway from Apple in China but left unaddressed by its author is Apple's current predicament and the larger predicament of the United States are the direct result of the failure of the American government to meaningfully enforce antitrust laws and a grossly flawed tax code that rewards capital gains which can be manipulated and punishes actual wages from labor. Ultimately, these predicaments stem from a faith on the part of American leaders that unbridled capitalism is the ultimate partner of democracy and is the most effective agent for creating democracy where it doesn't exist and maintaining democracy where it does exist. This faith is completely self-serving for those who believe it most fervently and completely unfounded based on real-world experience.
Lax antitrust enforcement allowed a single American corporation following its own financial interests to make decisions with grave economic, social and national security implications for an entire country. A society in which a single corporation attains a market capitalization of $3 trillion dollars amid an economy whose yearly economic production totals $30.5 trillion has no relation to the "invisible hand" market forces that create true efficiency and competition.
American tax policies accentuate the power of large corporations and the wealthy citizens that control them by rewarding strategies which boost stock prices and produce capital gains taxed at lower rates. Lower tax revenues are used as a motivation to cut government spending on primary, secondary and university level education essential to creating workers able to accommodate rapid changes in manufacturing needs.
The belief that engaging in trade with China would automatically enlighten the Chinese to change their policies regarding fair labor practices, human rights and democracy led the American government and American businesses to transfer hundreds of billions of dollars to bootstrap China's industries while gutting on-shore capabilities in America. At the same time, the American government rewarded American businesses for the temporary boost in profits via tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans.
McGee's citation of statistics regarding the Marshall Plan are very apt for the situation America faces. In 2025, it's America itself that needs a Marshall Plan. Much of our water and sewer infrastructure is 110-130 years old. Our transportation system is crippled by Robert Moses-era thinking about public versus private transit priorities that was demonstrably wrong when it was new one hundred and ten years ago. And federal and state governments are proposing laws that would further gut funding for public education required to raise the minimum level of proficiency required in modern business. For a glimpse into America's future with its current priorities, you only need to compare the economies of Western Europe in 1989 versus those in Eastern Europe. America lost this economic war. Without a legitimate Marshall Plan scale investment in our own future to rebuild, that future will be very bleak.
WTH
