Modern-day China is mainly characterized as having a market economy based on private property ownership, and is one of the leading examples of state capitalism.
"China can never rid itself of corruption unless and until the leaders have the courage to officially dump its Communist Constitution and put in a new ideology which is based on private property," Mr. Shaw said.
Francis Fukuyama first outlined this post-cold-war ideology of globalisation by claiming in his 1992 book, The End of History, that western liberal democracy, based on private property, free markets and regular elections, was the terminus of historical development.
He thus hoped, by integrating the working class into political and social life, to achieve a transition from a bourgeois state based on private property to a democratic constitutional state.
Society is based on private property; private property brings inequality, as some own more than others; such inequality brings forth social comparisons with others (amour propre), which in turn can produce envy, pride, and greed.
Here the idea is that the dispersion of power that results from a free market economy based on private property protects the liberty of subjects against encroachments by the state.
Not too surprisingly, classical liberals such as Hayek (1976) insist that the contemporary liberal fixation on 'the mirage of social justice' leads them to ignore the way that freedom depends on a decentralized market based on private property, the overall results of which are unpredictable.
From the eighteenth century right up to today, classical liberals have insisted that an economic system based on private property is uniquely consistent with individual liberty, allowing each to live her life —including employing her labor and her capital — as she sees fit.
A market economy based on private property, if left to itself, contains powerful forces of convergence, associated in particular with the diffusion of knowledge and skills; but it also contains powerful forces of divergence, which are potentially threatening to democratic societies and to the values of social justice on which they are based.
On the other hand, there was the innate social conservatism of Cromwell, and his repeated determination to save a stable, hierarchical social order based on private-property rights from the kind of Leveller socialism Colonel Rainsborough and others were preaching at Putney.
