S. 1260

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. LEE. Mr. President, the United States is at a crossroads in our strategy to counter the threat posed by Communist China. It is vital that we place ourselves in a position to compete with China, to be sure, but it is equally important that we consider just what kind of game we are playing and just what kind of competitor we aspire to be.

The bill before us, the Endless Frontier Act, aims to counter China primarily by boosting technology research and development. No doubt, these are important components of any strategy to counter China, but, unfortunately, it goes about it in the exact wrong way--trying to beat China at its own game and taking us across a frontier that we ought never to traverse. In fact, models of some of China's own bad strategies are emulated in this legislation, strategies that are in exact opposition--direct opposition--to American principles and American ways of life.

Let's consider some of the hallmarks of communist China. In every aspect, the Chinese regime grows and centralizes the power of government at the expense of free citizens and free markets--an experiment that has expanded into dangerous and even deadly territory. Take, for example, China's record on human rights.

China has gone so far as to enslave and subject the Tibetan and Uighur people to forced labor, reeducation, and torture. Under China's infamous one-child policy, it has brutally and barbarically forced families to undergo IUD implantation, complete sterilization, and abortion.

It has a long, dark history of religious persecution and of silencing dissidents. Under President Xi Jinping, Chinese authorities have detained millions of Muslims and arrested thousands of Christians. They have seized control of Tibetan monasteries and closed or demolished dozens of Buddhist and Taoist temples. They have even practiced forced organ harvesting of members of the Falun Gong religion.

Or consider China's actions in the realm of foreign policy.

In true imperialist form, China is pushing its Belt and Road Initiative--a massive, predatory infrastructure project that stretches from East Asia to Europe--designed to massively expand China's coercive economic and political influence. It has spread Confucius Institutes across American college campuses, entangling American universities with Chinese state policies and turning them into megaphones to repeat Chinese propaganda. In multilateral organizations, China continuously undermines longstanding democratic norms, instituting policies that, instead, benefit the Chinese Communist Party's authoritarian values, and it has held a tight, cronyist, command-and-control grip over its economy--heavily subsidizing industries and constantly picking winners and losers.

While China has picked up some steam through some of these actions, we cannot ignore that whatever momentum it may have acquired is of dubious success and minimal sustainability in the long run. You see, China, under the control of the Communist Party, has, in reality, one of the least efficient economies in the entire world. In terms of GDP per capita, it is quite the opposite of being at the top of the barrel. In fact, it is way down, right next to Cuba and Kazakhstan.

It turns out that political corruption and state-owned enterprises come with some financial dead weight too. The financial cost alone of enslaving, sterilizing, and brainwashing 12.8 million Uighurs and other oppressed groups is steep, even as the human cost of this moral depravity is far worse and infinitely steeper.

Killing future generations' potential through abortion is also as foolish as it is inhumane. As a result of its decades-long abortion and one-child or two-child policies, China is on track to lose a third of its workforce and age faster than any society in history. The ratio of workers to retirees in China, which is currently 8 to 1, is projected to whittle down to 2 to 1 in the coming decades. With only two employees for every retiree, China's pension system, which is already showing signs of buckling, will inevitably crack under pressure.

It is true that China is aggressive, and it is true that China is really big, but it is not ironclad in its position of global strength, to put it mildly. As its population ages more and more and as more of its land falls into wasted, polluted squalor, it will have neither the inhabitants nor the resources to continue on its current course of perceived economic prosperity.

There is nothing about China's principles or about China's trajectory that we should try to emulate, not in the least. In nearly every way imaginable, the Chinese regime consolidates power to trample the rights of individual men and women and quash free expression, the free exercise of religion, and free enterprise. Nothing could be more antithetical to the American system of government and the American way of life. In fact, it is precisely the opposite formula that has made us the world's strongest and most prosperous nation.

The Founders gave us a Constitution precisely for the purpose of dispersing and limiting power within the Federal Government and to keep government, in general, as close and accountable to the people as possible. And they gave us a Bill of Rights precisely to safeguard individual liberty and protect our most cherished freedoms--empowering ordinary men and women to preach and live out their deepest beliefs in the public square, to gather and speak freely, to bear arms, and to petition the government in redress of grievances.

You see, the beauty of this design is that it opens up the space for two separate but mutually reinforcing institutions that are at the heart of our vision of freedom and that are absolutely key to our success: a free enterprise economy and a voluntary civil society.

These systems work in tandem for everyone because they impel everyone to work together--harnessing individuals' self-interests to the common good of the community and, ultimately, that of the Nation. It is the free market system that prizes human ingenuity, rewarding people for putting their God-given talents and their own exertions and resources in the service of their neighbors.

The free market impels us to ask: What problems need to be solved? What can I do to improve other people's lives?

It is the free market that created the wealth that liberated millions of American families from subsistence farming, opening up opportunities for the pursuit of happiness never known before or since in government- directed economies. These are blessings that never will be known in an economy dominated by a government.

In America, it has also always been understood that the family is the building block of society, worthy of protecting and of empowering, and it has been the cooperation between families, churches, neighborhoods, clubs, and voluntary associations that have knit together the American social fabric and made it strong.

In other words, the beauty of the American system is that of opening up the space for everyday citizens to build creative, productive, meaningful, and happy lives together. These are the hallmarks of the American system of government, and these are the things that we ought to preserve in moving forward

Unfortunately, the bill before us attempts not to double down on our successes but to pivot to the so-called ``successes'' of China by federally hijacking research and development and crowding out the private incentives that bring successful ideas to market. It is a flawed and, ultimately, foolish strategy.

First, in our free and democratic society, we will never marshal the will to ramp up taxes and spend China into the ground, nor should we try.

Second, history has proven, time and again, that centralized planning is a losing game. The United States has already tried the industrial policy experiment of picking winners and losers and causing great harm in the process. In fact, that is exactly how we have ended up with the terrible protectionist policies like trade wars and the Jones Act.

The strategy of the Endless Frontier Act, however, is rooted in the mistaken belief that our markets have failed us and that the only means by which we can jump-start our economy and create innovation is by trusting in Federal Government bureaucrats.

So what would it do in reality?

It would green-light $54 billion in spending beyond our budget caps, with additional authorizations of $190 billion, and it would put this massive amount of money toward more government bureaucracy, producing a system where the government picks winners and losers in industry, creating artificial demand for inefficient technologies, crowding out the good research and development that the private sector already does, and increasing our manufacturing costs.

If we are to compete with China and maintain our leadership in technology, what, instead, should be our path forward? What should we do instead of passing this law that tries to compete with China by using strategies that work only for China and will never work here and must never work here?

We have to do what America does and always has done best. Instead of chilling innovation and competition, we ought to decentralize power and champion trust in the private sector. We ought to decrease regulation, not invest in regulatory bodies. We ought to simplify and cut taxes, not offshore our jobs. We ought to use our critical minerals, not let them languish. We ought to partner with our allies, not restrict fair trade. We ought to harvest timber, not organs. We ought to defend families, not diminish them. We ought to encourage entrepreneurship, not crony capitalism. We ought to strengthen markets, not government.

Two paths lie before us. I urge my colleagues to choose the better part and reject this bill.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source