Is China about to overtake the U.S. as the world’s number one economy? Looking at the question closer, the answer is a resounding “No”. The problem for China is the same problem inherent in big government anywhere. If there is one thing glaringly true about China, it is still a communist country with government, government everywhere, overt and covert. The economic reality is that jumps in productivity produce the real growth, but government is about politics, not productivity. Examples abound. It’s a powerful lesson beyond the imagination of our ruling revolutionary-Left Democratic Party.
Our new viziers need a walk down memory lane. The various iterations of the 1930’s New Deal mucked with the economy to such an extent that the Depression lingered and lingered for a decade, and was ready to resume after the War. WWII was a recess that only replaced one kind of misery for another. Finally, a stake was pounded into the heart of some of the New Deal by the ’46 and ’48 Congresses and the 50’s boom resulted.
Remember the 60’s-and-beyond War on Poverty, Urban Renewal, and the Fed’s management of the money supply as it opened the money spigot to grease the skids for them and war? Many of you weren’t around in the 1970’s; I was. It was a disaster. Today, huge portions of our cities and hinterlands are ghastly places.
That’s not all. Look at government’s mucking around with the schools. Once again, I was there. They’re still screwing with them. “Reform” and bucks flow in and ignorance flows out. Now, we are likely to get more of the opinionated ignoramuses, the kind who torch our cities and mutilate free speech.
One of the biggest boondoggles of recent memory are the massive governmental crusades to deal with the hyped “climate change” (previously “global warming”). Does Solyndra remind you of anything? California – with the highest utility rates in the country and can only fill its energy needs with large infusions from other states – is scarred with vast tracts of windmills. Homeowners, schools, businesses are under the gun to strap solar panels to their roofs. If you don’t play along, you’ll be bankrupted. All this for essentially nothing.
I could go on, but why bore you.
Red China, like Red California, is a bust. The ChiComs spout big numbers for the opinionated ignoramuses in our media, but the truth lies somewhere else. In many ways, they follow Stalin’s gambit of spewing big numbers, real or imagined. Mostly imaginary. There’s quite a different reality behind that Potemkin Village. Watch the video below from the American Enterprise Institute. It tells the truth about China.
Sadly, in the global competition, wreckers are in charge on the U.S. side of the divide. Maybe I should hedge my bets.
RogerG