Free speech, free press and labor standards are notoriously weak in China. China has a rich history and amazing culture. However, they lack the institutions of civil society for democratic debate about serious policy issues. This harms workers and producers in America.

The failure of the so-called super committee to agree on other spending cuts has finally brought the axe down on U.S. defense spending, and it's really going to hurt this time.

Our trade deficit is going to be balanced, the hard way or the easy way, eventually. And it will be essentially impossible for the U.S. to balance its trade without healthy manufacturing exports. Unless, of course, we are willing to reduce our standard of living.

Talk of a manufacturing revival is in the air. America has, in fact, gained a quarter-million industrial jobs since the start of 2010. Unfortunately, this is less than 15 percent of the number lost during the recession.

The ongoing decline of American manufacturing is not an abstraction. Over the past decade, the United States has lost 53,224 factories.

Imagine a bucket is our economy. The stimulus is the water poured into the bucket. The holes in the bucket are leakage into the global economy. We pour water into the bucket, and the water leaks out, creating jobs in India, Brazil, and Finland.

Moore explicitly states that we ought to turn to democracy as the alternative to capitalism. But the opposite of capitalism is not democracy, it is socialism.