China is not on track to catch up with the wealthy West. The Chinese state's commitment to highly interventionist mercantilist policies is leading to debt, malinvestment, and stagnation.
So long as we insist the federal government can force one law, one culture, and one sort of politics on all of America, the US is headed down the road of civil war. Only decentralization and separation can partly defuse the situation.
The Austrian-school approach, with its realist, real-world approach, is actually more inclined toward empiricism than the neo-classical economists who tend toward very abstract theories and models.
