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In the United States, in spite of their own conservatism and of the even greater conservatism of the Republican Party and the president, the Democrats are starting to succeed in turning into legislation Bernie Sanders policies on assistance to the unemployed and universally free healthcare. The irony of this is that while the Democratic Party in its primaries gave preference to a more moderate Joe Biden as their preferred presidential candidate, now they are pushing Bidens opponent, Bernie Sanders policies into legislation.

When the lives of millions are menaced by the health crisis and economies are threatened by resultant collapse, all of a sudden there evaporates the opposition to governments commanding the economy and to their skyrocketing welfare spending.

Rampant socialism is starting to rule Western democracies, where the word socialism was hitherto a dirty word. Who could have believed this even a few weeks ago?

It has been the captains of industry together with their private media mouthpieces, prominently including the worldwide Murdoch news outlets, which have brainwashed the public in democracies to privatise most government assets.

Banks, energy, telecommunication, the oil industry and even much of education and health have been privatised. All Western governments were urged to get out of running enterprises.

As a result most of the control over media, energy, banks and even education was taken away from national governments and were acquired by giant private corporations.Hence Western democracies rely only on taxes rather than having any earnings from lucrative and strategically important enterprises, like the energy and steel industries, telecommunications and national airlines.

Autocratic China went in the opposite direction, where the party-state government has become the controlling shareholder in just about every major Chinese-come-transnational enterprise. This enabled them to amass massive earnings to subsidise its enterprises to reduce the prices of goods and services to such an extent to which private transnationals cannot do because even their largest ones cannot match the Chinese Governments power of the purse.

China was therefore able to drive much of Western and Third World industries out of business and gain near monopoly power in vital industries such as textile, electronics and steel production where they became the factory of the world.

But with coronavirus, national governments in Western democracies started to commandeer major enterprises to produce what their nations needed, such as ventilators and masks. They provided major subsidies to companies to allow them to survive.

Theres been increased questioning of how Western democracies have allowed themselves to become dependent on Chinese-produced goods and of the need for governments to work with multinationals to bring much production back to Western democracies. For example, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, in his press conference on April 5, questioned the need of his state to having to have obtained ventilators from China because the US no longer produces enough of such strategic health equipment.

The realisation in Western democracies that their governments have to have control over major industries to be able to cope with recurrent crises such as epidemics and the effects of climate change may actually drive them to embrace democratic socialism to a much larger extent than they were willing to do so before. This could reduce the comparative superiority of Chinese state capitalism over the combined international power of Western social democracies.

Until now Chinas authoritarian regime has significantly outperformed Western democracies economically ever since it combined capitalism with major government ownership of capital and political control over the whole economy. But the Achilles heel of the Chinese system is the lack of accountability of the autocratic regime.

It would not be impossible for the Western and developing democratic states to maintain democracy while also gaining substantial ownership and control over lucrative strategic industries. This way the democratic states could have more control over their sovereignty and could also subsidise universally free health and education and provide extensive public housing and adequate unemployment benefits.

If so, world democracies may not only survive but become economically, politically and morally superior to the ruthless autocracy in China and by alliance could provide a buffer to Chinas expanding power to rule the world.

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Socialism used to be a dirty word, but is that the way were heading? - Starts at 60