This talk helps put the absurd “State of the Union” lecture about the need to be number one in the larger context.
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/15435/a-dose-of-reality-in-light-of-obamas-nationalism/
A Dose of Reality in Light of Obama’s Nationalism
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We should have listened to Napoleon. We didn’t and we will rue the day. For two thousand years or more the most trivial concept in China has been “freedom”. I doubt if their association with us will greatly change that. It’s far more likely to change us, by force.
Interesting speech (the ted.com one, not the POTUS).
I could argue with some of his points, but what strikes me most forcefully is the difference in knowledge, intelligence and honesty between this speaker and BHO. And it’s not an unfair comparison. Lack of official transcripts or any shred of academic writing notwithstanding, the President claims to hold university degrees and to have been a professor of constitutional law. But he can’t speak any language except a kind of illogical, incoherent drivel of nonsensical platitudes. I didn’t listen to the speech tonight, but based on previous speeches by Obama which I tried to parse and understand on the assumption that they contained some meaning, I confidently defy any of you to find a single paragraph of tonight’s SOTU address which contains a valid, factual and logical point and which is not contradicted elsewhere in the same speech.
If you watch the scene from the movie “Idiocracy” in which President Comacho delivers a SOTU and parse what he is saying, aside from the profanity it is actually a masterpiece of incisive logic compared to a BHO special. And the audience seems to be 100 times more intelligent and skeptical than most of the tweets I saw.
Apparently most Americans are unaware that their so called Commander in Chief is an imbecile. Or they are aware but afraid to admit it to themselves. Someone tweeted at the beginning of the speech (quoting from memory), “When I hear the speaker announce ‘And Now the President of the United States’ in those tones it gives me chills down my back, it makes me so proud to be an American!” That was someone who indicated in their profile that they are head of communications at some New York company, and presumably also has a college degree of some kind.
More than any statistics or other hard data, that is why it is absurd to claim that America (the state) has any longer the right to claim to be “number one” in the world. Insolvent, broke, but most of all just too damned stupid.
Although Idiocracy fits, I think Being There is more appropriate.
We keep hearing about competition, but it’s American technology like from Boeing, GE and Westinghouse that was funded with taxpayers money being transferred overseas. The secret to outsourcing is the transfer of US technology to countries that have cheaper labor based on paper exchange rates because they create new money out of thin air faster. Because the multinationals have access to the printing press they can put candidates into office that will support protectionist trade agreements called free trade and get access to newly created money out of thin air to fund the outsourcing of American jobs. The only way to neutralize the central economic planners at NAFTA, WTO and multinationals outsourcing to countries that have industrial policies and manipulated currencies is for States to create their own State banks and for communities to issue their own currencies.
North Dakota has their own State Bank and remained largely unaffected by the credit crisis of 2008-2009 which retained a budget surplus. States with their own State Banks would be able to create credit to fund industrialization in their States and have that money remain in their State. Washington State, Idaho, Neveda, Illinois, Virginia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Michigan, Oregon, California and other States are studying the prospect of creating their own state banks like North Dakota has. While countries like China, Japan and Germany create money out of thin air to fund production and encourage savings, the US creates money out of thin air to fund outsourcing, transfers of technology to China, military bases abroad and artificial consumption with debt. Not a policy for growth. Trade today is really just a money printing out of thin air game.
“One civilization many systems”
So, federalism?
Nope. Panarchy.
China, the Japan of the 1980′s? China, a bunch of racist statists?
Top down, top down, top down. That’s still the problem with China. The government is the economic puppeteer, which is why this guy’s 2050 economic projections are as useless and as inaccurate as 2050 climate-change projections.
I disagree with some of his points.
I accept his assertion that most westerners have no deep understanding of China. I agree that China will look very different to western eyes and not westernize in the way most other countries have westernized. (How will it happen, you ask? Really, I have no idea. It’s a Hayekian spontaneous order type of thing.)
I also agree that democracy, in the sense that most westerners know it, will not exist in mainland China. If it does, it would probably look like SIngapore or Hong Kong, which although those entities are highly capitalistic, they aren’t democratic in the usual western sense.
And I do believe China’s economy will surpass the US’s at some point in the next 20-30 years. (Unlike idiotic nationalists, I don’t give a damn who’s #1. I just want a high standard of living for myself, which isn’t dependent on some stupid concept of state borders.)
I have problems with his notion of the chinese conception on what the state is and how it should act. It sounded to me like a repeating of the image of the “new communist man” in a sense that, a chinese person (who is now a capitalist) saw the state as a necessary parental figure and welcomed and loved it. I think the tIbetans would disagree with him. Also, this notion of the “parent” state conflicts very squarely with my view of human nature, which I will admit is probably flawed in the sense that my view is largely western. Still, regardless of my overall “westernized” viewpoint, I have trouble accepting his position.
I didn’t bother to watch the SOTU because I wanted to maintain my health. But I am positive in saying, without question, this guy’s speech was way more interesting in comparison. Interesting talk with one major caveat–Martin Jacques was a hardcore Marxist. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was the editor of it’s journal, Marxism Today, for 14 years. I have trouble accepting anything any socialist/communist/anti-private property guy says. But still, maybe this guy’s like Chomsky? Full of correct facts and insights, but completely wrong on theory and conclusions. Or maybe he’s no longer communist? Maybe he was one of many that repudiated Marxism after the fall of the USSR? I don’t know. Either way, he was interesting nonetheless.
I have a hard time necessarily agreeing with him about this “parent state” idea also.
He points out the fact that China as a civilization state solidified itself thousands of years ago. But he is leaving out one salient point: the communists got in and forcibly molded the population to the tune of roughly 50-60 million dead to install their “perfect society” as Mao saw it. He made no mention of this although I am sure it had immense implications concerning the cultural attitudes we are seeing now.
Even disregarding this…even if culturally he is totally right…all he has proven is that China will definitely fail spectacularly. Why? Because it is a centrally planned society. Central planning does not work. Even presuming I am a small world westerner, the logical precepts of Human Action still hold. There are state “growth targets” set by some bureaucrat instead of allowing bottom-down scarcity based allocation via a genuine price mechanism. This crap is going to collapse. there ain’t no 2 ways about it.
The one saving grace concerning China is that it’s oldest and most influential ancient scholars were essentially anarchist in their bent. there is no inherent reason why the general masses could not conjure their ideas back up given that although the anarchist bent has been curbed in them, they are still those philosophers’ ideas (See Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought series on this point).
Chinese philosophical anarchism as relevant to any practical discussion of Chinese history? Surely you jest.http://mises.org/daily/4065
……I fail to see how this negates my essential point. Indeed it seems to clearly show that my point is valid: ideas and how they are implemented have consequences.
China as it currently is is still going to fail. I do not dispute this. My point was to show that given the ideological underpinning of their institutions (Taoism and Confucianism) I see no inherent reason why the ideas could not be bent backward to the original ones laid out by their originators.
Liggio is right that the ideas were essentially used by monopolist rules who bent them to their will. But it does not follow that this is the only way they can be used. I am not saying that it is likely that they will be used in this way. I doubt it would happen. My point was to show a theoretical saving grace that they do have on their side.
If central planning doesn’t work, and I agree that it doesn’t, how has China managed to sustain such high economic growth over the past couple of decades? Is there something we don’t know going on?
Just because you have a planner (or planners) in the mix, doesn’t change the fact that the basis for it all is the gigantic market that’s now in place.
Look at the US for example. It has all manner of planning, regulation, and barriers in the form of the IRS, EPA, NLRB, OSHA, FTC, FDA, DOE, FCC, DOT, USPTO, FTFC, SEC, FINRA, FDIC, NCUA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, not to mention the stupid/evil machinations of the Fed.
And those are just the organizations and depts I can remember, there’s dozens more at all levels (federal, state, county, city.) Even with all of these garbage that effectively strangles 40% of the economy, the US still has a huge capital base and large market that is, for the most part, one of the most open in the world.
As for China’s large growth, I would say that for one it’s partly for the reason I gave above, but also it’s because:
- After Mao’s death, it started its liberalization from a very low level, it had nowhere to go but up
- Provided it’s not interfered with via government manipulation, any capital stock is like a snowball, it’s syngergistic. . . China is no different
- Labor and environmental laws are nowhere near as onerous and problematic in the west
- It had/has a massive potential workforce of a billion plus people
- It had/has a massive potential market of a billion plus people
- It opened itself to massive amounts of outside investment
- It has, for the most part, respected property rights
- Workers are willing to work harder for less wages than an average western worker, having grown up in absolute poverty and as adults see the market economy as a huge opportunity to have a much, much higher standard of living
- Their government isn’t involved in fighting wars in 4 different wars thousands of miles away in different parts of the globe (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen)
- Their government isn’t spending about a trillion a year on its military or a network of 700+ military bases
- Their government spends more on infrastructure than the military (the government shouldn’t be spending any money on this, but given the choice between military and infrastructure spending, infrastructure is better)
China isn’t perfect, of course. Keep in mind, many current signs point to a coming bust in China. Inflation looks to be a problem there, in addition they have an overbuilt commercial real estate market. Indicators suggest there will be a crash soon. It’s also possible there might be civil unrest due to these problems in combination with irritation at some of its big brother tactics. None of these issues changes the fact China is still going to be a bigger economy than the US at some point.
What J Cortez said above as well as one additional point:
Growth in and of itself is not necessarily good.
How is growth measured? usually it is by the increase in GDP.The problem with GDP measurements is myriad.
First it does not take into account government spending, so right there we have a distortion in whether the growth is genuine market growth or simply manipulation of the numbers by a bureaucrat who simply tells people to build crap. A really good example of this are the various ghost cities throughout China. Huge cities that the government had built that house essentially no people.
This leads to our second problem: government growth targets. Markets are only sustainable when they are determined by consumer desires. The chinese still have numerous state industries which have targets for growth in their products determined by the state. Again, we have here the creation of goods and services which do not comport with consumer desires.The chinese are doing well largely because of what they were able to escape from, not because central planning works. We have to recall that before this they had significantly worse policies (liked the forced creation of communal steel mills set by the government for example). Anything which liberalizes them from this is of course going to make them wealthier. But imagine how much more wealthy they would have been had they not had to do that OR if they had liberalized more after Mao’s death.
Chinese Culture Will Change Too!
The speaker, Martin Jacques, has an exagerated belief in the virtue of democracy, not just in political terms. He assumes that what will drive the culture in the future is the relative size of the population. This is also incorporated in his assumption of the importance of the Chinese concept of race that he described.
At the end he sums it all up by saying that all of these trends should be of interest to us ‘humanists.’ To an ear not alert to the particulars of the information that he shared this statement may just go in one ear and out the other.
The speaker does miss the significance of the ‘touch of the finger of God’ in the evolution of human civilization even though he does mention that Confucius was indispensable to the Chinese culture. His linear analysis which includes the materialistic empiricism of the ‘Goldman Sachs’ data is just as blind as the narrow and uninformed view of the West towards other cultures.
Humans are not robotic and are subject to inspiration and the same is true for human civilization because human civilization is always directly or indirectly inspired by the appearance of a Manifestation of God.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12273005
As Austrians and Libertarians, why do we play into the who will be bigger the US or China paradigm? What does it matter? Isnt this just another top down way of thinking? Shouldn’t we be looking at it from the perspective of Individuals? If I trade a thing in the US to my neighbor for a thing and we are now both better off than before why care what they make in china? Why do we have to make or do what china makes or does? why compete at all? We are free to do and make other things? So what if they have this or that? What does it matter? We have this other thing or that? If they make cheep goods well, let them. We can do something else. Do we really need two chinas?
I couldn’t get past the first minute of that worthless talk.
First come the “predictions about 2050,” followed immediately by the caveat that “…one should keep in mind that these statistics were compiled before the recent crisis.”
So, they’re projecting things out to the year 2050 and can’t even account for the very first “anomaly” to come along? I’d call that being a dimwit, if it didn’t smack of outright fraud.
The ultimate fallacy is that all of the world’s problems can be fixed with a good speech writer and a teleprompter.
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