China -- for real or not

A closer look at China's banking system here  suggests big trouble ahead.  If something is too good to be true, it probably isn't going to last.  So it is with China's "progress" over the 30 years. They are an industrious and bright people, however, they have built there industrial might with the help of a banking system that isn shakier than our own.  In addition at some point in time they will have to deal  with the absence of political freedom.

Tax fairness

Obama is always blathering about the rich paying their fair share of taxes, about  lifting the burden off the middle class by the rich paying "a little" more, blah, blah, blah, blah.  All knee-jerk liberals spout the same nonsense, and always have.  What all these cynical operatives are doing is sewing seeds of class envy in order to pander for votes.  This approach to political power has been going on since capitalism create a wealthy minority as well as an affluent middle class.  Since liberals really don't like or want risk in their lives, they can only get ahead by acting as intermediaries, taking from those who are risk-takers and have accumulated wealth, and giving to those who, like themselves, avoid risk and seek only  security in their lives.  This state of affairs will never change.  In this article Thomas Sowell tells those who want to know, just how stupid this fairness argument is.

How high the cost of gas?

Richard Epstein, a law professor, historian, economist par excellence, weighs in here with a bit of Hayekian economics regarding the latest run up in gasoline prices.  His advice to politicians:  keep your solutions to yourselves and let the gasoline market take care of itself, i.e., laissez-faire economics.  No doubt the right idea!

Andy Stern -- SEIU oracle

Andy Stern, formerly head of the corrupt SEIU, the most frequent visitor to the White House in Obama's first year as President, and now a senior fellow at Columbia University's Richman Center, weighed in a couple of months ago in a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece with his deepest thoughts on the superiority of China's economic model.  Like any good Marxist, Stern believes in and enthusiastically endorses China's top down economic planning through five year plans: 

"The aims: 7% annual economic growth rate; a $640 billion investment in renewable energy; construction of six million homes; and expanding next-generation IT, clean-energy vehicles, biotechnology, high-end manufacturing and environmental protection -- all while promoting social equity and rural development." 

In other times Stern would have been in the forefront of all the socialists and their media enablers who praised, even worshipped, Mussolini's fascist state, Nazi Hitler's National Socialism, Stalin's Soviet Socialist Union and Mao's Great Leap Forward.  All these regimes had top down economic planning, one party political systems, no individual rights, no freedom of religion, captive state media, and prisons for political dissidents, in common.  These may be nice models for the short term success of Andy Stern and his cronies, but certainly not for the rest of us who live here on planet earth.  These utopian models eliminated unemployment,  income inequality, were all committed to "social justice",  and were responsible for over 50 million deaths while improving the standard of living for a handful of party members.

China's Communist Party leadership incorporated one element into its otherwise brutal dictatorship that the others did not: a measure of economic freedom.  This freedom allowed their latent entrepreneurial class to create the manufacturing juggernaut that we have observed in play over the last 30 years. The Chinese Communist economic system is best understood as the apotheosis of crony capitalism.  No financing occurs in China except through government agencies.  In the end, crony capitalism distorts economic development and fails because capital is always misapplied.  Furthermore, while China's accomplishments in the economic realm have been, in a way, extraordinary, it would be a mistake to overly laud this success coming as it has at the expense of important individual freedoms cherished in the West.  Chinese capitalist millionaires now enjoying their success in Shanghai, Beijing, and Chongqing are but the slip of the tongue away from Communist Party confiscation of their wealth and exile to a gulag. Any government that can for what ever reasons -- as we personally observed on a trip to China some years ago -- shut down television coverage of the devastation caused by a major earthquake in one of the provinces, can deprive citizens of property, freedom and life without notice.  This is called fascism and it means the state is all powerful. It also means individuals have only the rights conferred on them by the state.  Forget China's economic success,  Hitler's National Socialism enjoyed zero unemployment and record annual GDPs for many years.  The regime there is in no way to be trusted and certainly not idolized or emulated like some would have us.  

Finally, Stern criticizes our system for lack of planning and "team" effort:  "The conservative-preferred, free market fundamentalist, shareholder-only model -- so successful in the 20th century -- is being thrown into the trash heap of history in the 21st century.  In an era when countries need to become economic teams, Team USA's results -- a jobless decade, 30 years of flat median wages, a trade deficit, a shrinking middle class and phenomenal gains in wealth but only for the top 1% -- are pathetic."   Stern should take his nose out of Mein Kampf, Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, and Marx's Das Kapital, and read a little more about American history.  What he would learn is that big time government intervention in the economy was tried by both Hoover and FDR administrations.  The net result, after 10 years of effort, as described by Henry Morganthau (FDR's Secretary of the Treasury)  in 1939: 

                          "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” 

Socialism is a failed experiment.  It failed in colonial New England when the Puritans tried it nearly 400 years ago, after 80 years of tyranny it failed in Russia, it failed in Cuba, North Korea, India, and all over Africa.  It has failed everywhere because the governing model of organizing peoples' lives for them does not comport with human nature and the innate desire for freedom.  Sterns of the world, fascists all, don't get this because in their arrogance they do not recognize reality.  Always in the name of "social justice", fascists presume to know best what will make people happy. Obama's cram down of Obamacare on the American public.   Stern's praise for the order brought about by a fascist dictatorship. Fascists never learn.