The conservative-preferred, free-market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model -- so successful in the 20th century -- is being thrown onto the trash heap of history in the 21st century. In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA's results -- a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1% -- are pathetic.

This should motivate leaders to rethink, rather than double down on an empirically failing free-market extremism. As painful and humbling as it may be, America needs to do what a once-dominant business or sports team would do when the tide turns: study the ingredients of its competitors' success.

Stern is a frequent visitor to the White House and no doubt his views receive a warm welcome there. 

There are many problems with the article. Stern does not know what a free market system is. Blaming the economic performance of last decade on the free market is like blaming the rape victim. We have no free market. Both candidates in the last presidential election were unadmitted socialists. Maybe the better term for what they were is the "f" word. 

I am old enough to remember all the countries that were supposed to be the big monster we were told to fear. In the 70's it was Europe. (Although there were books that argued to a European readership that the challenge for them was America like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber The American Challenge.) Later it was the supposedly evil Japanese who would buy America on the cheap. I even remember the Sean Connery movie called Rising Sun which played to these fears. Now it is the Chinese we are supposed to fear-or in Stern's case follow. 

Click on Picture for explanation of this photo. The society that Stern is praising in the article is China-yes, China. The country that forces every woman to have an abortion if she has more than one child. The country that forced 1 million people to leave their homes with minimal compensation to build the Three Gorges Dam. The country that has few environmental laws. The country that rigs the currency system to shaft the American worker. The country that has no freedom of speech. That country. 

Maybe you look at things differently than me, but I have no desire to have America imitate China. 

The "f" word I mentioned earlier is a word that describes our system that no one will admit to being accurate. The "f" word is fascism. None Dare Call it Fascism.