Former Microsoft COO Robert Herbold, writing in the Wall Street Journal offers "China vs. America: Which Is the Developing Country? /From new roads to wise leadership, sound financials and five-year plans, Beijing has the winning approach" (link). If you aren't laughing/crying already, consider this:

Government Leadership: Here the differences are staggering. In every meeting we attended, with four different customers of our company as well as representatives from four different arms of the Chinese government, our hosts began their presentation with a brief discussion of China's new five-year-plan. This is the 12th five-year plan and it was announced in March 2011. Each of these groups reminded us that the new five-year plan is primarily focused on three things: 1) improving innovation in the country; 2) making significant improvements in the environmental footprint of China; and 3) continuing to create jobs to employ large numbers of people moving from rural to urban areas. Can you imagine the U.S. Congress and president emerging with a unified five-year plan that they actually achieve (like China typically does)?

Or this:

Human Rights/Free Speech: In this area, our American view is that China has a ton of work to do. Their view is that we are nuts for not blocking pornography and antigovernment points-of-view from our youth and citizens.

Obviously, there are a few other things involved in both, such as millions of people dying or being killed in past Five Year Plans and heavy restrictions on dissent in the present including forced labor camps for political opponents. Herbold doesn't seem to be all that concerned with such minor matters nor does he seem to be too very familiar with nor keen on basic American concepts.

But, he does have a point to a certain extent: China is able to succeed in large part due to central planning and having big goals. The U.S. didn't win World War II or put a man on the moon or succeed with many other major projects without both of those. For the former the closest we came to the Chinese way of doing things was something like Manzanar, which probably was a mistake but that's debatable.

From the supposed other side of things, open borders libertarian nut Donald Boudreaux calls [1] Herbold a "statist". Yet, Herbold really isn't all that far from the libertarians ideal. Herbold would have a large, nearly-all-powerful central government running things. Boudreaux and other libertarians would simply replace that nearly-all-powerful government with a nearly-all-powerful private "government" consisting of the Koch family and a small number of the very rich. And, both Herbold and libertarians are just concerned with money and not with higher concepts. The libertarian alternative doesn't think of the U.S. as a concept or even a country so much as a trading zone in which to implement some sort of Amway-style scheme: a very small number at the top, perhaps those like Boudreaux in the second level, and with everyone else on the third and final level.

The Herbold mindset would have won WWII, but might have committed crimes on the Mao scale. If libertarians had been running the U.S. in the 1930s, wir wuerden nun Deutsch sprechen because those libertarians would have sold us out in one way or another.

The alternative to both is a powerful but constrained central government that can do big things but that puts broad U.S. interests first, not just the interests of the moneyed or specific racial or ethnic groups.

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[1] cafehayek . com/2011/07/enough-already-with-namby-pamby-liberalism.html