printOBAMA IS. You can coast to the presidency absent any understanding of economics. The rise of China Obama put down, in his pep-talk to the nation, to the child-rearing methods of the Tiger moms (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33597). Sinophobia notwithstanding (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=584), as American society is increasingly silhouetted by the State, China is undergoning considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class, and poverty levels that have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.
Obama thinks that a nascent China owes its increasing economic strength not to this liberalization, but to the fact that they “started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science,” and that the government is “investing in research and new technologies. Just recently, China became home to the world’s largest private solar research facility, and the world’s fastest computer,” he added.
The truth is that the US is in the red and getting redder, not China.
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The central planner-in-chief also denounced his subsidies to the oil industry—he did a lot of denouncing of policies he had either put in place, or could have repealed—while, in the same breath, recommending that we “invest in tomorrow’s energy.”
In other words, state planning is a “subsidy” when it is applied to “bad” energy, but an “investment” when applied to the “good” energy source.
The Goods on Gas for Asses: The more efficient the source of energy, the less waste and pollution are involved in its conversion into energy. Think of the totality of the production process! The fewer resources expended in bringing a fuel to market, the cleaner and cheaper is the process.
Oil is the second most efficient, cheapest source of energy, Obama’s wish is our demise. For ordinary folks, the biomass-based economy means life without the basics.
UPDATE (Jan. 27): In reply to Bob’s comment: Neither do I hold China to be a capitalist society, if you read the article I cited. But neither do I think the US is capitalistic any longer; we just pretend we are. My comments spoke to a trend: China is growing because it is liberalizing its economy; we are shrinking because we are centralizing ours.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703514904575602731006315198.html
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/State-companies-lead-Chinas-growth-charge/articleshow/6464918.cms?curpg=2
I thought you’d like to know that Nelson Mandela seems to be quite ill. He is currently in hospital, although the official word is that it is a “routine checkup”.
Whether and how fast the US is becoming socialist is a question separate from whether and how fast China is reforming its system of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”
I do not hold the view that China is an emerging “capitalist” society. Neither do I believe that Chinese President Hu Jintao is “capitalistic.”
Last year, Hu encouraged local Shenzhen cadres to “push forward the construction of the system of socialist core values, firm up beliefs in socialist ideals with Chinese characteristics, and to popularize patriotism, collectivism and socialist ideas.” In 2008 Hu said that the Chinese Communist Party “’never copies the political system and model of the West’” – and that it must avoid the ‘deviant path’ of capitalist values.” (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LI30Ad01.html)
In his book “Socialism” Ludwig von Mises observes: “Production can either be directed by the prices fixed on the market by the buying and by the abstention from buying on the part of the public [consumer sovereignty]. Or it can be directed by the government’s central board of production management. There is no third solution available. There is no third social system feasible which would be neither market economy nor socialism. Government control of only a part of prices must result in a state of affairs which—without any exception—everybody considers as absurd and contrary to purpose. Its inevitable result is chaos and social unrest.”
The truth is that China remains socialist. The CCP Politburo remains in firm control. Chinese economic reforms are less a “liberalization” than a change from a bureaucratized Soviet-style socialism to a top-down socialism of the German pattern. Either way the “inevitable result” will be “chaos and social unrest,” which is evidenced now in China by rampant corruption, stunted innovation, malinvestment, both subtle and obvious, and a bifurcated society of “haves” and “have nots” (i.e., those who have political influence or connections and those who have not).
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KC20Ad01.html
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/LD22Ad02.html
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=559685&p=2
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/2010-09/03/content_20859345.htm
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/KE16Ad01.html
Recognizing that “Chinese expert” may be an oxymoron, here’s one expert’s opinion:
http://www.fpri.org/footnotes/1220.200706.friedman.livingwithoutfreedomchina.html
OIL, OIL, & MORE OIL! Please take a look:
http://www.windsorstar.com
In the BUSINESS section, there are two headlines leading into Countries that will prosper from oil at $100 / bbl and Countries that will not. It’s an interesting read especially when the U.S. is being directed back to the Stone Age’s Fuel of Choice: weeds, wood, and cow dung.
I was going to respond to the bulls**t on “we need more scientists” when I decided to look up Kevin Aylesworth who used to postdoc at Naval Research Lab and after applying for hundreds of jobs and getting no offers, contacted other frustrated postdocs and founded the Young Scientist’s Network. Turns out that the same old American Physical Society who earlier said we needed more Aleutian Islander Physicists wound up hiring Aylesworth to be a Congressional Fellow – talk about the ultimate in co-option.
http://www.aps.org/programs/honors/prizes/prizerecipient.cfm?name=Kevin%20Aylesworth&year=1996
Just train thousands of bored ghetto kids in science and you will produce Einsteins by the boatload! And, of course, there is a great market in the US for such talent (facetious!). So why are there postdocs floating around in job purgatory while lawyers get starting salaries over $ 200,000? Hire more gym teachers to “teach science” and America will beat back the Yellow Peril!
As for the science to get to the moon wasn’t around in 1958 – did that blathering fool ever hear of Sir Isaac Newton? Amazing how political asses who know NOTHING about science can prance around like self-anointed experts because they are the Johns who control the pursestrings to America’s Scientific whores.