The first was an open question, because while we all know that the WTO is not staffed by US Marines, it is rather funny to think about who should punish China for their actions against the WTO. It is an analogue to the "You and what army?" line of arguments, because against China, we're empty handed. Neither trade nor marines will help us in collecting a fine or tariff against them.
Secondly, Muslim doesn't mean Arab, but Arab is clearly the leading culture/language when it comes to Islam. The Koran is written in Arabic and scholars say it is impossible to translate it without damage to the sanctity of the text.
And if we don't have an open insurgency somewhere in my Western Europe within fifteen years, I break out the Champagne. We don't have no-go areas, where police are shot at with rifles and we don't have districts, where firetrucks and ambulances are burned by "youths". We don't have 60% of our murders done by "youths" and we don't have people calling for Shariah in the UK. No, that's all right-wing propaganda, I tell you, because we live in immigration utopia. It's just that pork and wine are increasingly hard to come by in some quarters after all merchants selling it were beaten blue until they stopped. And people don't like to ride the subway after dark in Brussels, don't like to go out in Malmö and don't like to go to Anderlecht and Paris suburbs at all. But people are just overly anxious, these are not the youths you're looking for.
Taiwan is full of Chinese, that's why they call themselves the "Republic of China" (and claim the whole mainland, their maps say it is currently "administered by the PRC").
Anyway, this is probably the most defended little island of the world, but without the US ready to defend them, they're toast if the PRC has a hissy fit.
Sure they want to be free, just like most people, but defense against the PLA - a million soldiers, that is - is hard without several carrier battle groups for backup. That's what I meant by buying out the US.
Suffrage is the most important aspect of democracy, but you're dancing around the crucial point: how much is that suffrage actually worth?
Would you like live in a state with 70% income tax, where you had full suffrage, but half the population is voting YOUR money into THEIR pockets?
What if the income tax was 80%, 90% or 99%? What about 100%?
The reason behind that is fairness. Universal suffrage where the electorate is entitled to steal from everyone else is mob rule and you should know that. And the distinction between a welfare state and a cleptocracy is actually very hard to define objectively.
You can construct extreme cases with few taxpayers and many voters where it is quite obvious that suffrage has a price limit. I would set it at about 100% of my income for a decade, because otherwise a democracy would still mean everyone is bankrupt.
Real wages have stagnated, because either demand for labor has decreased or supply of labor has increased.
If you don't change supply and demand of labor, you can artificially try to fix prices and wages with no hope of doing anything substantial. Unless you can fix the prices everywhere the planet and then you still get strong black market and possibly a secondary currency commonly associated with controlled economies, e.g. cigarettes or gold coins.
Imagine you can set taxes freely. The USA is large instance of Sim City 4 and you have a slider control where you can tax all stratums of society any way you like.
We make further friendly assumptions: - we can properly define "top-end income" without inflation slowly strangling the middle class that somehow find themselves in the "top-end income" definition a few decades down the road without actually having any expendable wealth. - the top-end income tax can be set to 50% or more without a revolt - the top earners do not flee in droves because of that, so we don't need to build a Berlin wall and Iron Curtain - the top earners do not stop working so hard because of that, so we do not need to build Joy Concentration Camps. - we can pull that off for 50 years without the economy collapsing
How much of the current national debt have we just paid back?
And why should The State meddle in setting wages and distributing wealth?
How could we make sure The State is objective, fair and just?
How can we make sure that none of our fellow revolutionaries orders the execution of his friends to attain Sole Party Rule?
What will we do with greedy capitalists who resist and clever selfmade-men who suddenly strike rich?
Would you prefer that fifty million people who never paid a dime of taxes vote on how the taxes of everyone else are supposed to be spent?
I would agree to cut government welfare, subsidies, pork barrels and all that, if it prohibits the transfer of wealth from taxpaying voters to non-taxpaying voters, but the next election will revert that again.
This is a rather fundamental bug in our democracy: two wolves and one sheep CAN have a majority vote on what's for dinner and they increasingly do.
A vote weighted by taxes paid could produce a similar situation, where taxpayers just band together to prohibit all currently non-taxpaying poor from ever acquiring wealth. That is bad enough, but at least it is just in the way that taxpayers pay for their choices.
We are increasingly striking the boundaries of democracy itself, which is quite scary because we all know what lies beyond, shown from Germany '33 to Somalia 2009.
I just don't know how else we could stop letting voters decide upon other people's wallets because the current situation will bankrupt us all.
Figuratively speaking, our kids are ordering up and down the menu and we are going to pay. We have mortgaged the house several times over and still cannot stop the kids from ordering another round of Champagne. Actually, they order truckloads of Champagne and sending it to God knows who all around the country, in fact the world and they call it welfare, benefits and aid.
I know why you absolutely detest a correlation between paying taxes and voting in elections. Would you rather give your kids a credit card that can indebt you for several hundred years?
I don't know if you're talking about China or the USA, but I'll bite.
First point, a small number of greedy elite: I don't trust official statistics, especially not those from the Chinese Ministry of Truth. But in plain daylight, you can view - hundreds of large condominiums, - new ones built in all Chinese cities. - every apartment sells for more than a hundred thousand dollars, - much more in cities above 1 million inhabitants. - quadruple or tenfold that in larger cities or nicer locations (view on sea or river) within subway rings. - prices are visible in billboards or adverts and people pay these prices. - these condominiums usually are have 40-60 floors with several hundred apartments. - most apartment units are sold, new condominiums are usually sold out before the construction workers leave the site. - credits and loans to private individuals are rare in China. No one would mortgage their house to buy a car, and no one would provide a loan either.
There's enough affluent people to pay for these millions of apartments for several hundred thousand dollars each, which is the hall mark of the middle class all around the world.
Second point, ethics and morality: Ethics and morality don't provide strength by themselves. They are easily squashed under the heel of a superior might, so I wouldn't hide behind them when push comes to shove.
Against China, this means several carrier battle groups and a strategic missile wing to boot.
Without economic and military power, we are destined to be the comic relief and goofy sidekick of the hero. You Americans are depending on loans taken out from the Chinese to pay for your army, which is funny enough, but my European governments don't even have an army to speak of and would rather enlist the Care Bears, which is almost cute in its naivete. Either way, our ethics and morality will help us cope with the diminishing role on the world stage. It cannot magically waive our debts we so wisely accumulated by paving the moral high road from Afghanistan to Tijuana.
We can hold up our standards and go broke. We can lower our standards and race to the bottom. They will win and we still go broke. Hobson's choice.
We took out loans from China to hold up our standards. How honorable was that? Was it in our best interests?
Would you think it was a smart thing to borrow money from non-free China to free a non-free Iraq? Would it be a smart decision to continue unabated tax-and-spending that is actually a tax-and-loan-and-spending?
Lunch meets bill I say.
I didn't say it will be easy and I'm certain we cannot hold all our standards. We can keep everything, Champagne in the mess hall of the Titanic if you will or we can decide now that we might need the musicians fixing leaks and pumping water instead of playing in the mess hall just now.
We could do with some fresh air of fiscal rationality in all our Western governments: - no new deficits, whatever happens - cut spending by 5% in all departments starting now and then again every year until the debt is gone. - perpetually prohibit a deficit. The government can and shall establish reserves for wars and crises, maybe precious metals, maybe foreign currencies, maybe even Neodymium, if that could store some value. - instate some correlation (but not an absolute one) between voting and tax paying, so non-taxpaying voters cannot establish claims on other people's tax money.
If you said "ok, but don't cut spending in THAT area", you fail the test. Jettison or sink, your choice.
The right wing partisans will claim this is because the economic boom and spending cuts caused by republican presidencies is producing this delayed surplus after they were voted out of office when they hobbled too many special interest groups in doing that.
We can reverse Republican and Democrat in that sentence without changing its meaning or providing a means to test which president actually helps reducing deficits, since spending, taxes, economy and government subsidies really take a while to bring their full effects, which is probably the reason why Presidents doing that are promptly losing the next elections.
This however is not the point. The point is that we are addicted on spending and while some presidencies fixed the DEFICIT for a few years, none could ever hope to fix the DEBT.
If The West was an economic simulation game, we would be seeing the Insert-Coin screen for decades.
Now that we have made that clear, it would be no problem for a rational and sensible electorate to vote for a party or candidate that tries to do something about it, right? Good luck cutting spending by 0.1%.
All the points you mentioned are factually correct and I'm not politically correct enough to disagree with that.
It will however mean a huge loss of influence, leading to an equal reduction in trade and wealth influx and also require the forfeit of several of our ideals of humanity, civilization, freedom, democracy and all that.
I don't know if we're ready to sacrifice our holy cows just yet. Ironically, the refusal to deny or cut back on any of our holy ideas is what brought us the wealth in the first place AND then squandered it.
Now excuse me while I start flogging myself to relieve me of my White Guilt again.
We would first need to define who "We", then what "our interests" are, before we could do anything else.
Currently, we have problems at the "We" level and with increased balkanization in the Southern states of the US and the Islamization in European capitals, I don't think we can get over that any time soon.
A welfare state is a human zoo anyway, almost equal to a Somalia-type free market in terms of robbing people of their dignity. But we needn't worry about that - open borders AND a welfare state is financial suicide and we're not willing or able to abolish either. Chickens, home, roost, ten years, counting down.
It is our debt, the Chinese are our creditors. We can default on our loan and abstain from importing more consumer goods from China, we will survive that.
I just don't know if the political system, even the Bill of Rights itself will survive the upheaval that will follow when 80% of our consumer goods suddenly quadruple in price or vanish from the store shelves.
Take a good look around the room you're currently sitting in. If it isn't Cheyenne Mountain, I bet half of all things in it is Made in China.
I would not single out patents or IP, it is all laws and regulations that promote or prohibit anything. All these are driving up the cost of the actual product, so a company without restrictions could outcompete restricted companies at least in the short term.
That doesn't mean we should resort to a Somalia-style free market, but think about viable countermeasures, easing of restrictions, protective tariffs and/or the quiet elimination of a holy cow or two.
I don't know where you read China as Utopia in my post. I wrote they are powerful, played their cards right and got lucky that we are increasingly castrating ourselves.
And it's absolutely true that more Chinese people are living a much better life today than ever before. They are still subject to absolute governmental power and have no right to anything The Party doesn't want to give to them. They are living in much better economic and social conditions than only a few years ago which doesn't make it an Utopia. It is still becoming more liveable every year, though.
And I don't want to live in any deeply rural area, thank you. I like being anonymous, because being anon is being free.
The Chinese people can demand all they want, they got no Bill of Rights and no Second Amendment to force their superiors to implement one.
Since yesterday, they are facing prison for looking at pictures of naked women on the Internet.
I don't think they will get around demanding anything anytime soon.
There's three possible hierarchies in Asia: superior, inferior and worthless. Only the inferior are allowed to pay tribute.
But are of course people of equal hierarchy level meeting each other sometimes, so there must be rules concerning such an occasion, Confucian or otherwise. Anyone enlightened here to clear that up?
Umm, the Chinese did not cut off the supply of Opium. They cut off the demand for opium. The British were illegally smuggling opium from India into China, then the Chinese enforced their laws, giving Britain the thinnest veil of excuse for an invasion.
China has a complete industrial base, albeit lacking in product development and fundamental research. The West doesn't produce a third of its consumer goods.
We can put off war and wait a few years while different special interest groups happily scuttle away our taxes, national debts and then some more. We take out a loan and win another election. Raising taxes, cutting spending won't win elections, so naturally we have been taking out loans for twenty years now.
The most financially successful presidency in thirty years was barely able to stop taking out new loans and we might never know if that was because of Bill Clinton's skills as a president or simply because the economy boomed so much that the special interest groups actually lagged behind in demanding more funds. That will not stop a thousand posters to start a bipartisan flame war on every instance it is mentioned, though.
Fact: we spend more than we can ever hope to pay back. With our national debts being what they are, China has us by the balls. One false move and they squeeze a little. We are already squeal in a pretty high pitch, obviously inviting the whole world to join in the gang rape fun. So cut back spending, pay pack the debt or we will soon be facing some unsettling and devastating deals: Taiwan vs. a 10-percent debt relief? Israel in exchange for cheaper Iranian oil? Who knows?
When the WTO issues a huge fine, will we send the Marines to Beijing to collect it? Will we settle it against the national debt?
Our forces are overextended enough as it is. Within five years, we have Iran or Israel burning and in desperate need of democratization and/or support. Within fifteen years, we will probably have an open insurgency somewhere in the Greater London, Brussels or Paris when their Muslim reaches the size of a small Arab state like Lebanon and Syria. And neither Afghanistan or Iraq will be a stable democracy by then and will collapse as soon as we leave or already did.
Our democratic system contains a serious flaw because budget deficits are allowed, enabling instant gratification for all elected officials with payments beginning only after their term of office. Since tax payers and voters are different electorates, iterative evolution preferred parties exploiting it to the fullest for which is what we had for almost 20 years now in all Western countries. All types of government struggle hard when the budget is strained too far and has to be cut back, but I seriously doubt a Western-style democracy is able to do that, especially as there is no more defined "demos" anywhere that could come to a finite set of consensuses, but a gaggle of minorities clamoring for their share of the loot.
If the national deficit spending continues, China could buy back all of Taiwan simply by relieving some percent of our national debt and we will still be thankful to have some room in our budgets again. We will never recover from our debts and we cannot survive without China giving us more loans every year, so they can practically demand whatever they want. In our world, politically correct may trump factually correct, but in the real world, all lunches must be paid for.
The rule you're looking for is "If it works, it isn't stupid."
And for China, the current economy works wonders of almost biblical proportions. Millions have now decent homes, electricity, food, water and clothing who previously had none. Billions in the world now have cheap commodities and consumer goods. They will not stop any time soon and frankly I can't hold it against them, because currently it works extremely well.
While we spend our energy battling ecological strawmen and Islam, China will begin to top out the US in terms of power and wealth.
I would rather ask what we did wrong so it could come to this, what our faults were concerning the trade balance, national debts, tax, regulations, protective tariffs and all that.
Imagine half of your constituency is on state welfare and consistently voting for more welfare and higher taxes, because they never pay any. No party can win by promoting lower welfare and the parties that promote higher welfare will march from victory to victory. Higher taxes drive more and more taxpayers out of their jobs, putting them on welfare. After a year or two on welfare, they will vote on higher welfare, too, repeating the process.
How on earth would you fix this without bankrupting the state, facing instant insurrections in all major cities or derailing the whole system?
Oh, and the most profitable tax payers are continually leaving the country to a neighboring state with lower taxes, as their skills or wealth usually enables them to change countries much easier than everyone else.
Nah, just make sure that votes and taxes paid are somehow correlated.
Every adult one vote and then another one for every ten thousand dollars worth of taxes paid personally (companies and such don't count).
This will end pork barrelling and welfare queening at the same time and brings back a decent perspective on what the state should and should not do and what he can and cannot pay.
If you live on welfare: tough luck, but we don't let you vote up your own welfare checks paid for someone else. If you pay low taxes: nice, because you make decent profits then. If you pay high taxes: also nice, because you can make a difference in the next election.
Here in Europe, we have massive welfare budgets, high deficits because of that (think of a third(!) of the entire annual budget!) and also a high number of welfare recipients that now form a sizeable voting block.
Think of it: 1. Welfare recipients always vote for more welfare. 2. A democratic state where every person has an equal vote must comply with that and raise welfare. 3. In such a state, parties that promote lower welfare lose the elections, parties that promote higher welfare will win. 4. Higher welfare means
a) higher taxes, decreasing the amount of money the taxpayers can spend on other things.
b) higher deficits, decreasing the amount of money the state can spend on other things. 5. Less spending on "other things" diminishes the economy. 6. Diminished economy means job losses. 7. People without jobs become welfare recipients. 8. rinse, repeat
A similar effect is routinely seen when parliament members vote on their annual allowances and the results are spectacular, but their impacts are fortunately limited because the number of representatives is fixed and there's only so much cash they can take home without being tarred and feathered.
But the group of welfare recipients can grow indefinitely. I would never expect them to be more rational and selfless than the members of parliament, so having them vote on their own pay is a runaway cascade of fiscal dynamite.
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The first was an open question, because while we all know that the WTO is not staffed by US Marines, it is rather funny to think about who should punish China for their actions against the WTO. It is an analogue to the "You and what army?" line of arguments, because against China, we're empty handed. Neither trade nor marines will help us in collecting a fine or tariff against them.
Secondly, Muslim doesn't mean Arab, but Arab is clearly the leading culture/language when it comes to Islam. The Koran is written in Arabic and scholars say it is impossible to translate it without damage to the sanctity of the text.
And if we don't have an open insurgency somewhere in my Western Europe within fifteen years, I break out the Champagne. We don't have no-go areas, where police are shot at with rifles and we don't have districts, where firetrucks and ambulances are burned by "youths". We don't have 60% of our murders done by "youths" and we don't have people calling for Shariah in the UK. No, that's all right-wing propaganda, I tell you, because we live in immigration utopia. It's just that pork and wine are increasingly hard to come by in some quarters after all merchants selling it were beaten blue until they stopped. And people don't like to ride the subway after dark in Brussels, don't like to go out in Malmö and don't like to go to Anderlecht and Paris suburbs at all. But people are just overly anxious, these are not the youths you're looking for.
Taiwan is full of Chinese, that's why they call themselves the "Republic of China" (and claim the whole mainland, their maps say it is currently "administered by the PRC").
Anyway, this is probably the most defended little island of the world, but without the US ready to defend them, they're toast if the PRC has a hissy fit.
Sure they want to be free, just like most people, but defense against the PLA - a million soldiers, that is - is hard without several carrier battle groups for backup. That's what I meant by buying out the US.
Suffrage is the most important aspect of democracy, but you're dancing around the crucial point: how much is that suffrage actually worth?
Would you like live in a state with 70% income tax, where you had full suffrage, but half the population is voting YOUR money into THEIR pockets?
What if the income tax was 80%, 90% or 99%? What about 100%?
The reason behind that is fairness. Universal suffrage where the electorate is entitled to steal from everyone else is mob rule and you should know that. And the distinction between a welfare state and a cleptocracy is actually very hard to define objectively.
You can construct extreme cases with few taxpayers and many voters where it is quite obvious that suffrage has a price limit. I would set it at about 100% of my income for a decade, because otherwise a democracy would still mean everyone is bankrupt.
Do you think the price of labor-intensive products that currently are 100% imported from China will increase or decrease?
Will the number of people that can afford such a product - say, a Thinkpad Laptop - decrease or increase because of that?
What does it tell us about the actual wealth of that locally manufacturing economy? :)
Real wages have stagnated, because either demand for labor has decreased or supply of labor has increased.
If you don't change supply and demand of labor, you can artificially try to fix prices and wages with no hope of doing anything substantial. Unless you can fix the prices everywhere the planet and then you still get strong black market and possibly a secondary currency commonly associated with controlled economies, e.g. cigarettes or gold coins.
Imagine you can set taxes freely. The USA is large instance of Sim City 4 and you have a slider control where you can tax all stratums of society any way you like.
We make further friendly assumptions:
- we can properly define "top-end income" without inflation slowly strangling the middle class that somehow find themselves in the "top-end income" definition a few decades down the road without actually having any expendable wealth.
- the top-end income tax can be set to 50% or more without a revolt
- the top earners do not flee in droves because of that, so we don't need to build a Berlin wall and Iron Curtain
- the top earners do not stop working so hard because of that, so we do not need to build Joy Concentration Camps.
- we can pull that off for 50 years without the economy collapsing
How much of the current national debt have we just paid back?
And why should The State meddle in setting wages and distributing wealth?
How could we make sure The State is objective, fair and just?
How can we make sure that none of our fellow revolutionaries orders the execution of his friends to attain Sole Party Rule?
What will we do with greedy capitalists who resist and clever selfmade-men who suddenly strike rich?
Would you prefer that fifty million people who never paid a dime of taxes vote on how the taxes of everyone else are supposed to be spent?
I would agree to cut government welfare, subsidies, pork barrels and all that, if it prohibits the transfer of wealth from taxpaying voters to non-taxpaying voters, but the next election will revert that again.
This is a rather fundamental bug in our democracy: two wolves and one sheep CAN have a majority vote on what's for dinner and they increasingly do.
A vote weighted by taxes paid could produce a similar situation, where taxpayers just band together to prohibit all currently non-taxpaying poor from ever acquiring wealth. That is bad enough, but at least it is just in the way that taxpayers pay for their choices.
We are increasingly striking the boundaries of democracy itself, which is quite scary because we all know what lies beyond, shown from Germany '33 to Somalia 2009.
I just don't know how else we could stop letting voters decide upon other people's wallets because the current situation will bankrupt us all.
Figuratively speaking, our kids are ordering up and down the menu and we are going to pay. We have mortgaged the house several times over and still cannot stop the kids from ordering another round of Champagne. Actually, they order truckloads of Champagne and sending it to God knows who all around the country, in fact the world and they call it welfare, benefits and aid.
I know why you absolutely detest a correlation between paying taxes and voting in elections. Would you rather give your kids a credit card that can indebt you for several hundred years?
I have an inkling.
But what does it do to an economy grown entirely dependent on the import of cheap finished goods?
I don't know if you're talking about China or the USA, but I'll bite.
First point, a small number of greedy elite:
I don't trust official statistics, especially not those from the Chinese Ministry of Truth. But in plain daylight, you can view
- hundreds of large condominiums,
- new ones built in all Chinese cities.
- every apartment sells for more than a hundred thousand dollars,
- much more in cities above 1 million inhabitants.
- quadruple or tenfold that in larger cities or nicer locations (view on sea or river) within subway rings.
- prices are visible in billboards or adverts and people pay these prices.
- these condominiums usually are have 40-60 floors with several hundred apartments.
- most apartment units are sold, new condominiums are usually sold out before the construction workers leave the site.
- credits and loans to private individuals are rare in China. No one would mortgage their house to buy a car, and no one would provide a loan either.
There's enough affluent people to pay for these millions of apartments for several hundred thousand dollars each, which is the hall mark of the middle class all around the world.
Second point, ethics and morality:
Ethics and morality don't provide strength by themselves. They are easily squashed under the heel of a superior might, so I wouldn't hide behind them when push comes to shove.
Against China, this means several carrier battle groups and a strategic missile wing to boot.
Without economic and military power, we are destined to be the comic relief and goofy sidekick of the hero. You Americans are depending on loans taken out from the Chinese to pay for your army, which is funny enough, but my European governments don't even have an army to speak of and would rather enlist the Care Bears, which is almost cute in its naivete. Either way, our ethics and morality will help us cope with the diminishing role on the world stage. It cannot magically waive our debts we so wisely accumulated by paving the moral high road from Afghanistan to Tijuana.
We can hold up our standards and go broke. We can lower our standards and race to the bottom. They will win and we still go broke. Hobson's choice.
We took out loans from China to hold up our standards. How honorable was that? Was it in our best interests?
Would you think it was a smart thing to borrow money from non-free China to free a non-free Iraq? Would it be a smart decision to continue unabated tax-and-spending that is actually a tax-and-loan-and-spending?
Lunch meets bill I say.
I didn't say it will be easy and I'm certain we cannot hold all our standards. We can keep everything, Champagne in the mess hall of the Titanic if you will or we can decide now that we might need the musicians fixing leaks and pumping water instead of playing in the mess hall just now.
We could do with some fresh air of fiscal rationality in all our Western governments:
- no new deficits, whatever happens
- cut spending by 5% in all departments starting now and then again every year until the debt is gone.
- perpetually prohibit a deficit. The government can and shall establish reserves for wars and crises, maybe precious metals, maybe foreign currencies, maybe even Neodymium, if that could store some value.
- instate some correlation (but not an absolute one) between voting and tax paying, so non-taxpaying voters cannot establish claims on other people's tax money.
If you said "ok, but don't cut spending in THAT area", you fail the test. Jettison or sink, your choice.
The right wing partisans will claim this is because the economic boom and spending cuts caused by republican presidencies is producing this delayed surplus after they were voted out of office when they hobbled too many special interest groups in doing that.
We can reverse Republican and Democrat in that sentence without changing its meaning or providing a means to test which president actually helps reducing deficits, since spending, taxes, economy and government subsidies really take a while to bring their full effects, which is probably the reason why Presidents doing that are promptly losing the next elections.
This however is not the point. The point is that we are addicted on spending and while some presidencies fixed the DEFICIT for a few years, none could ever hope to fix the DEBT.
If The West was an economic simulation game, we would be seeing the Insert-Coin screen for decades.
Now that we have made that clear, it would be no problem for a rational and sensible electorate to vote for a party or candidate that tries to do something about it, right? Good luck cutting spending by 0.1%.
All the points you mentioned are factually correct and I'm not politically correct enough to disagree with that.
It will however mean a huge loss of influence, leading to an equal reduction in trade and wealth influx and also require the forfeit of several of our ideals of humanity, civilization, freedom, democracy and all that.
I don't know if we're ready to sacrifice our holy cows just yet. Ironically, the refusal to deny or cut back on any of our holy ideas is what brought us the wealth in the first place AND then squandered it.
Now excuse me while I start flogging myself to relieve me of my White Guilt again.
We would first need to define who "We", then what "our interests" are, before we could do anything else.
Currently, we have problems at the "We" level and with increased balkanization in the Southern states of the US and the Islamization in European capitals, I don't think we can get over that any time soon.
A welfare state is a human zoo anyway, almost equal to a Somalia-type free market in terms of robbing people of their dignity. But we needn't worry about that - open borders AND a welfare state is financial suicide and we're not willing or able to abolish either. Chickens, home, roost, ten years, counting down.
It is our debt, the Chinese are our creditors. We can default on our loan and abstain from importing more consumer goods from China, we will survive that.
I just don't know if the political system, even the Bill of Rights itself will survive the upheaval that will follow when 80% of our consumer goods suddenly quadruple in price or vanish from the store shelves.
Take a good look around the room you're currently sitting in. If it isn't Cheyenne Mountain, I bet half of all things in it is Made in China.
I would not single out patents or IP, it is all laws and regulations that promote or prohibit anything. All these are driving up the cost of the actual product, so a company without restrictions could outcompete restricted companies at least in the short term.
That doesn't mean we should resort to a Somalia-style free market, but think about viable countermeasures, easing of restrictions, protective tariffs and/or the quiet elimination of a holy cow or two.
I don't know where you read China as Utopia in my post. I wrote they are powerful, played their cards right and got lucky that we are increasingly castrating ourselves.
And it's absolutely true that more Chinese people are living a much better life today than ever before. They are still subject to absolute governmental power and have no right to anything The Party doesn't want to give to them. They are living in much better economic and social conditions than only a few years ago which doesn't make it an Utopia. It is still becoming more liveable every year, though.
And I don't want to live in any deeply rural area, thank you. I like being anonymous, because being anon is being free.
The Chinese people can demand all they want, they got no Bill of Rights and no Second Amendment to force their superiors to implement one. Since yesterday, they are facing prison for looking at pictures of naked women on the Internet. I don't think they will get around demanding anything anytime soon.
There's three possible hierarchies in Asia: superior, inferior and worthless. Only the inferior are allowed to pay tribute. But are of course people of equal hierarchy level meeting each other sometimes, so there must be rules concerning such an occasion, Confucian or otherwise. Anyone enlightened here to clear that up?
Fixed that for you.
China has a complete industrial base, albeit lacking in product development and fundamental research.
The West doesn't produce a third of its consumer goods.
Up the creek and no paddles. Since decades, BTW.
We can put off war and wait a few years while different special interest groups happily scuttle away our taxes, national debts and then some more. We take out a loan and win another election. Raising taxes, cutting spending won't win elections, so naturally we have been taking out loans for twenty years now.
The most financially successful presidency in thirty years was barely able to stop taking out new loans and we might never know if that was because of Bill Clinton's skills as a president or simply because the economy boomed so much that the special interest groups actually lagged behind in demanding more funds. That will not stop a thousand posters to start a bipartisan flame war on every instance it is mentioned, though.
Fact: we spend more than we can ever hope to pay back. With our national debts being what they are, China has us by the balls. One false move and they squeeze a little. We are already squeal in a pretty high pitch, obviously inviting the whole world to join in the gang rape fun. So cut back spending, pay pack the debt or we will soon be facing some unsettling and devastating deals: Taiwan vs. a 10-percent debt relief? Israel in exchange for cheaper Iranian oil? Who knows?
When the WTO issues a huge fine, will we send the Marines to Beijing to collect it? Will we settle it against the national debt?
Our forces are overextended enough as it is. Within five years, we have Iran or Israel burning and in desperate need of democratization and/or support. Within fifteen years, we will probably have an open insurgency somewhere in the Greater London, Brussels or Paris when their Muslim reaches the size of a small Arab state like Lebanon and Syria. And neither Afghanistan or Iraq will be a stable democracy by then and will collapse as soon as we leave or already did.
Our democratic system contains a serious flaw because budget deficits are allowed, enabling instant gratification for all elected officials with payments beginning only after their term of office. Since tax payers and voters are different electorates, iterative evolution preferred parties exploiting it to the fullest for which is what we had for almost 20 years now in all Western countries. All types of government struggle hard when the budget is strained too far and has to be cut back, but I seriously doubt a Western-style democracy is able to do that, especially as there is no more defined "demos" anywhere that could come to a finite set of consensuses, but a gaggle of minorities clamoring for their share of the loot.
If the national deficit spending continues, China could buy back all of Taiwan simply by relieving some percent of our national debt and we will still be thankful to have some room in our budgets again. We will never recover from our debts and we cannot survive without China giving us more loans every year, so they can practically demand whatever they want. In our world, politically correct may trump factually correct, but in the real world, all lunches must be paid for.
The rule you're looking for is "If it works, it isn't stupid."
And for China, the current economy works wonders of almost biblical proportions. Millions have now decent homes, electricity, food, water and clothing who previously had none. Billions in the world now have cheap commodities and consumer goods. They will not stop any time soon and frankly I can't hold it against them, because currently it works extremely well.
While we spend our energy battling ecological strawmen and Islam, China will begin to top out the US in terms of power and wealth.
I would rather ask what we did wrong so it could come to this, what our faults were concerning the trade balance, national debts, tax, regulations, protective tariffs and all that.
Imagine half of your constituency is on state welfare and consistently voting for more welfare and higher taxes, because they never pay any. No party can win by promoting lower welfare and the parties that promote higher welfare will march from victory to victory. Higher taxes drive more and more taxpayers out of their jobs, putting them on welfare. After a year or two on welfare, they will vote on higher welfare, too, repeating the process.
How on earth would you fix this without bankrupting the state, facing instant insurrections in all major cities or derailing the whole system?
Oh, and the most profitable tax payers are continually leaving the country to a neighboring state with lower taxes, as their skills or wealth usually enables them to change countries much easier than everyone else.
Nah, just make sure that votes and taxes paid are somehow correlated.
Every adult one vote and then another one for every ten thousand dollars worth of taxes paid personally (companies and such don't count).
This will end pork barrelling and welfare queening at the same time and brings back a decent perspective on what the state should and should not do and what he can and cannot pay.
If you live on welfare: tough luck, but we don't let you vote up your own welfare checks paid for someone else.
If you pay low taxes: nice, because you make decent profits then.
If you pay high taxes: also nice, because you can make a difference in the next election.
Here in Europe, we have massive welfare budgets, high deficits because of that (think of a third(!) of the entire annual budget!) and also a high number of welfare recipients that now form a sizeable voting block.
Think of it:
1. Welfare recipients always vote for more welfare.
2. A democratic state where every person has an equal vote must comply with that and raise welfare.
3. In such a state, parties that promote lower welfare lose the elections, parties that promote higher welfare will win.
4. Higher welfare means
a) higher taxes, decreasing the amount of money the taxpayers can spend on other things.
b) higher deficits, decreasing the amount of money the state can spend on other things.
5. Less spending on "other things" diminishes the economy.
6. Diminished economy means job losses.
7. People without jobs become welfare recipients.
8. rinse, repeat
A similar effect is routinely seen when parliament members vote on their annual allowances and the results are spectacular, but their impacts are fortunately limited because the number of representatives is fixed and there's only so much cash they can take home without being tarred and feathered.
But the group of welfare recipients can grow indefinitely. I would never expect them to be more rational and selfless than the members of parliament, so having them vote on their own pay is a runaway cascade of fiscal dynamite.
Noble Savages, White Guilt, Ethno-Transcendentalism.
A few sequels and we can call them the Bluesploitation movies.