For one thing, both Viet Nam and China have far more rapid economic growth than the US. They use five year plans, they have state run shareholders, they even retain ownership of traded stock under the law.
And they don't need to steal everyone else's labour and money to do it. Here's an excerpt from Stacker:
According to Global Firepower, the United States military has 2,141,900 total personnel and 1,218,900 active-duty personnel. Its airpower, land strength, and naval strength are among the top in the world with 13,298 total aircraft (the most of any country) and 415 total naval assets. That’s on top of 6,287 tanks, 1,056 rocket projectors, and 39,223 armored fighting vehicles.
So where is the most powerful military in the world keeping all of its troops and vehicles? It turns out, all over the world.
It's capitalism that produces war, because you must always expand the market. You must always maintain profit increases. This means you need constant resources, constant development and constant cheap labour.
That's why China and Viet Nam are currently closing down sweatshops whilst the US is building more and more of them. Because NATO influence is eroding, so the East doesn't have to listen to US demands anymore. They can go back to paying their workers and supporting the labour unions.
Here's an excerpt from a study by The Continental:
Knowing who the poor are in a country of 1.4 billion people is an enormous undertaking. Recognising the limitations of a sampled-data statistical method, China moved towards a household identification system, which means getting to know every single poor person in the country, their conditions, and their needs. This was done through a combination of sending people to the villages, practising grassroots democracy, and deploying digital technologies. In 2014, 800,000 Party cadres were organised to visit and survey every household across the country, identifying 89.62 million poor people in 29.48 million households and 128,000 villages. More than two million people were then tasked to verify the data, later removing inaccurately identified cases and adding new ones.[23]
While income is the primary deciding factor, housing, education, and health are also taken into consideration when listing a ‘poverty-stricken household’. Village committees, township governments, and the villagers themselves are mobilised to assess the status of each household. Public democratic appraisal meetings, for example, are held to facilitate discussions among community members about each family’s situation and whether they should be removed from or added to the poverty registration list.[24] This on-the-ground process was paired with the creation of an advanced information and management system, touching on all parts of the poverty alleviation process across the country. Big data is used to monitor the situation of each of the nearly 100 million individuals, facilitate information flow between governmental departments, and identify important poverty trends and causes.[25] Mobilising the people and gaining public support are at the heart of the effort to carry out this work.
This is a very different approach from the United States supporting fascist dictatorships in Columbia and Brazil, and illegally sending mercenaries to Venezuela.
And people have actually tried to start worker owned businesses in the US for a long time, and what happened was that the US government sent in hundreds of soldiers, mercenaries and even sections of the Ku Klux Klan to slaughter people in broad daylight:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_worker_deaths_in_United_States_labor_disputes
I think it would be a wonderful idea to take back the government from corporate lobbyists and career politicians, who are motivated by market forces and profit motives. It is long overdue that both the US and Western Europe deprivatise their government mandates and instead pursue democratic mandates.
