In a Letter to The Wall Street Journal Wednesday, one writer had this on the idea of the People’s Republic of China being a competitor with its renminbi as global reserve currency and its bond market as debt safe haven:

Credible money paired with reduced government spending have long been pillars of conservative rhetoric stateside, and with good reason.

Indeed. However, what the writer elided are the capital risk the PRC poses with its history of limiting or barring repatriation of profit, the economic risk from the PRC’s requirement that foreign companies give up their technologies and intellectual properties to domestic companies as a condition of doing business in the PRC, and the political risk of the PRC’s requirement that companies supply its intelligence community with any information that community “requests.”

The absence of these risks in the US also is an important aspect of conservative economic and political thought—and not just rhetoric.