I have to assume it wasn't a concerted effort to depend mostly on China for imports. Companies are each making the best financial decision for themselves and China turned out to be the more competitive option most of the them.
All currencies are manipulated. It's a meaningless statement.
Imperial economics 101, really. Offer stability in one hand and demand compensation with the other.
That's probably (mostly) true today, but it wasn't always the case and it doesn't have to be that way. More importantly, just because most countries manipulate their currencies doesn't mean its meaningless to take issue with the practice or to notice when one country does it more aggressively than others.
Any country which did not abuse their citizens or subsidize their businesses became noncompetitive.
And why would you use old school taxis when uber/lyft were offering $5 rides in a 7x7mile area, and how could old taxi companies compete when they are forced to compete with people not bound by market forces?
Advocates for a Soviet style centralised economy exist, but they aren't common.
Marx himself, prescriptively, wasn’t all to specific beyond the distant end-goal stateless system and the immediate next steps in contemporary states (particularly, in terms of a detailed agenda, Germany, but he made some commentary on some steps other places.) But even where he was, plenty of people that share his critique of capitalism either don’t see his intermediate term prescriptions as realistic areas of concern for organizing current effort, or don't see them as mevessarily desirable at all.
State-owned liquor stores pay rent or own property.
Grocery stores are a business with 5%-8% margins, how much more should they cede?
The more simple question in my opinion is whether state run liquor stores are an overreach. The industry is already heavily regulated as it is, state stores sure seems like anticompetitive behavior.