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No. Do you know nothing about history? It’s not that we don’t perceive of China as a threat, but that the threat they represent is strategic and rational and not tactical and irrational.
The motivations of the Chinese are much closer to those of the Soviet Union than a rogue nation like Iran.
Iran and their terrorist drones have no problem with the notion of burning down the world in order to be seated upon a throne of skulls and a kingdom of ash.
The Chinese are rational in the sense that they know that such actions would result in catastrophic retaliation. They are capable of being deterred.
The Terrorists not only don’t care about deterrence, they invite destruction because they believe they’ll be going to paradise if they die as martyrs.
It definitely helps when one’s adversary isn’t a death cult. We need to do things to counter China’s boundary pushing but the odds are pretty good they won’t preemptively EMP us or something (though if they did that to us and Europe it would put them in the equivalent position we were in after WWII). The only thing that gives me pause with China is that they do have one similarity with our adversaries in the M.E. They have a large number of young men that don’t have a good shot at getting married. In the M.E. it’s cultural (dowries, power marriages, etc…) but in China it’s a numbers imbalance due to the one child policy. What do you do with a bunch of young dudes who don’t have prospects in that regard? Ultimately I don’t think with China that will be an issue, but it might be.
The Soviet Union was the greatest threat to the US, precisely because it had capabilities similar to the US and could challenge the US. The terrorists lack any such ability, and terrorism itself has always been a part of history. We should not lose sight that the greatest threat to nation-states are other nation-states. Terrorism is just the natural flora of geopolitics.
Ian Bremmer and Kevin Rudd would also like to know why we are not having more debates about China.
Peter, congrats on the beemer. It is flat out gorgeous. As a previous bmw owner, I can attest that nothing else drives like a German sports car.
Unfortunately, I had to sell my old bmw 325i. The old, leaky rag top worked fine in the high deserts of eastern Oregon, but was simply not up to the torrential rains of south eastern Arkansas, where I presently reside. So now I’m a truck man, but oh how I miss that old beemer.
We had plenty of debates about the Soviet Union, which you and your fellow-traveler ilk pooh-poohed at the time. Surely, the best thing we can do to contain and deter China is to continue to maintain our navy and other strategic superiorities, correct?
The issue with the Terrorists is that they only have to get lucky once and have the right partner when they sucker punch us. For instance, Al Qaeda operatives + an Iranian nuke coming in through unchecked shipping containers. I can see this being a scenario.
The Chinese have no desire to do such a thing – they are economically bound up with us, so why on Earth would they first purchase all of that US debt and then proceed to bomb it into valuelessness? Is it just to lull us into a false sense of security?
Look: The Chinese are playing the long game. The VERY long game, like “The past 600 years of Western Dominance were a big misunderstanding” Game.
So if the Chinese are set on ending Western dominance, and have the capability to do so, shouldn’t our biggest priority be to stop them?
Also, the debt thing is very much exaggerated as both a means of stability and a means of exerting power. Countries that have their own currency have enormous freedom in international affairs, let alone a country that has the global reserve currency, and US debt is a minor investment when compared to Chinese investments in their own infrastructure. Since their investments are done through a lens of gaining dominance, and that dominance is prevented by the United States, why wouldn’t they want to bomb the United States at some point in the future?
Furthermore, the best thing we can do to deter China and maintain US primacy is to grow the economy through investments in infrastructure. At least, that is what the government can do. After all, the reason that China is cited as a great threat is due to its gdp growth relative to the US (or at least that is where it derives the ability to harm the West).
Thank you for the thoughtful answer to my question on Facebook. I think Rob’s suggestion of linking to sources is a very good one. I do some brief reserach on whatever I’m commenting on before commenting. I have thought that I should have a database so that I can rebut more efficiently.
Adding to what jmelvin said, I feel that many people do use Facebook to get their news. I get many sponsored posts from leftist internet publishers (not sure if that’s the right word). I sometimes get sponsored posts from rightist publishers, but not nearly as often. My guess is that money is being spent by these organizations to work on forming opinions.
Something I have seen that is disheartening is a particular publisher called “The Political Garbage Chute,” a leftist satire publisher. Nothing wrong with satire, of course, however, the comments on their posts indicates that a majority of their readers think they presenting true stories, not fiction. A recent post was about Rand Paul dropping the F bomb on a reporter as he says being a libertarian means not having to care about anyone, with a stream of comments saying “Wow! Rand Paul is even worse than I thought!”
When I get those, I post a quick comment, “This is a satire. It is not a real news story.” I saw at least one other person do that same thing, within a stream of credulous progressives. Low information voters, indeed.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that China’s “investments in infrastructure” are literally it pulling large chunks of its country out of a near pre-industrial age. They are currently doing what we did in the early 20th century. Interstates, powerlines, etc are being put into place for the first time, not merely maintained and upgraded. They are also investing a lot of money they don’t actually have and building airports and cities with roads to them that quite literally no one is living in or using. Those aren’t investments, they’re work projects. I acknowledge that this isn’t all of what they are doing, but it is a great deal of it. We can’t re-industrialize our country like they are currently doing, we’ve already done it.
Frankly, I enjoy the Q&A podcasts where the Ricochet podcasters answer listeners’ questions. I say once a quarter, minimum.
Yes, because the thing that will deter the Chinese is a better viaduct. You don’t really believe that, do you?
The Chinese believe that inevitability is their ally. They don’t have to engage us in war to defeat us, as we are currently busy defeating ourselves. The Government simply can’t keep up with the expected growth in entitlement spending in the next 20 years without cratering the economy through punitive taxation.
So, while we’re busy tearing ourselves apart economically because we can’t afford to pay for people’s healthcare and retirement in perpetuity while they’re still quite young, the Chinese don’t care about such things and are growing their per capita GDP.
I agree that many of the investments are unproductive, but there are still a giant amount of productive investments we could be making in the US. Furthemore, in a world of scarcity, one country growing faster than another implies that scarcity is passed on to the country that is growing slower. They are consuming resources and raising commodity prices for all. Whether are not they have good reasons for doing so has no bearing on the prices paid by US consumers.
Which commodities would those be? Oil? Have you noticed that the price of that most crucial of resources has basically cratered to the point where many domestic producers are forced out of the market?
If you want to see a market that has been driven mad, just look at world corn prices as a result of ethanol mandates. Eliminating those mandates and ending agricultural subsidies would return sanity to that market – which, incidentally, many people point to as a proximal cause for so much instability around the world.
Actually, their lack of a developed social safety net is a big weakness. Their population is older than the US, and they have to find a way to ease burdens on families that would otherwise be forced to save their money for elderly relatives, who otherwise would put that money towards more productive investments or towards consumption. The Chinese government realizes this.
You and the Washington Post are laboring under the delusion of projection. You and they wrongly assume that the Chinese deeply care about the plight of their older citizens.
Also, with a personal savings rate that high, the Chinese don’t have to worry about creating cradle-to-grave welfare systems like we have, which have perversely had the effect of destroying people’s incentive to save.
Maybe we ought to cut back on some of the social welfare programs in order to get people to save more money on their own?
That is because of increased production. The permanent increase in the price level of oil since 2001 has been a China story. Only recently have prices fallen, and I doubt they will be permanent, and I have even greater doubt that we will get anywhere close to oil prices during an month of 2001.
Now, I am not sure what you mean with corn prices. Corn prices have fallen. If there are any subsidies on the corn market, then that would have the effect of lowering prices. If there are some mandates that are supposed to be inflating the price of corn, they don’t seem to be having an effect.
Now, corn could be cheap right now because of inefficient farming practices by…China (and corn seems to be the only commodity that China has lowered in price), but again this speaks to a world of commodities determined not by a free-market nation-state but by one that demonstrates that you can pick and choose which parts of neo-liberalism can be followed while ignoring others and still possibly become the most powerful country on Earth (which should say something about the supposed truths of many tenets of Conservatism).
I did a quick read through. Some of it is good, some of it is useless, and a good portion of it shouldn’t be done by government. A good number of these aren’t happening because they are being held up by red tape, fear mongering environmentalists, and stupid lawsuits, not because no one wants to invest in them (this is especially true for energy like Keystone, Nuclear, Dams, and levees). Parks, etc, are nice but they are not “infrastructure investments”, they’re nice to have but improve quality of life, not the economy and should be local projects. Trains, “mass transit” and the like are almost non starters for 90 % of the country. We aren’t Europe, we’re more spread out. The only part of AmTrak that pays for itself is the NorthEast corridor and bigger cities that need them should be the ones to pay for them. These things only work in high density areas where people live on top of each other. I’m not saying that there aren’t good places for the government to do what only it can, but pretending that the infrastructure investment alone is some panacea for the economy just doesn’t pan out.
Their high savings rate is actually preventing reform that would propel China to greater power. The Chinese government also does not look favorably upon the high savings of its citizens. China is trying to move its economy towards greater consumption and less savings.
If we cut back substantially on social welfare programs, that would be a disaster. Money that would have gone towards investments in corporations or innovations would instead be tied up in just trying to provide for old age. Indeed, as James Pethokoukis has noted on this the site, the welfare state increases innovation and provides an economic boost.
Of course increased production lowered oil prices! Thanks, professor! Now the prices have fallen so low that higher production cost sources have fallen out of the global supply.
So, I’m still waiting to see what commodities you were talking about whose prices are being driven crazy by demand from China.
Sure, there has been a longer term runup in the price of some agricultural commodities as denominated in dollars – I don’t know if that’s the case as against other currencies – but, so what? That indicates to me that we shouldn’t be burning corn as fuel when we could be eating it and allowing market forces to drop the price.
It also indicates to me that there’s no need for continuing these subsidies.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the supposed truths and tenets of conservatism. Of course you’re going to get explosive economic growth if you turn a population of 1.6 billion loose economically. Who has denied this? Economic power translates neatly to military power.
What remains to be seen is whether or not you can do that and consequently maintain the sort of draconian political control the ChiComs have over their nation. The test will probably come when the bubble bursts.
Sometimes, environmentalists have fears that are unjustified for certain projects, but the fact is that spending on infrastructure has fallen as a share of the economy (report lists transportation and water infrastructure spending).
I don’t really know if you’re serious about wheeling out Pethokoukis as some archon of the free market or if you’re just trolling. Suffice to say, I take many of the things I read from James with a grain of salt. He deposits a sort of drive-by article where he never interacts, and we’re supposed to take that as gospel?
Negative, ghost rider.
Was it a “disaster” when Bill Clinton signed welfare reform in the 90’s? Would it be a disaster if we raised the retirement age to 70, now that average life expectancy is much higher? Would it be a “disaster” if we cut food stamps by 10% across the board?
It wasn’t a disaster then and wouldn’t be a disaster now. People have to trim their sails, dude. The productive can only be fleeced so much.
The increased production only lowered the prices so much. The price level is permanently higher thanks to Chinese demand.
Which means that you agree with me that we should end all agricultural subsidies, right? If the price is “permanently” higher, that means that consequently demand and consumption must be higher which can in turn support higher levels of production for highly efficient American farms. We certainly don’t need to be paying people to not grow stuff.
Life expectancy is not much higher for poor people (and it is lower for poor women), so raising the retirement age would be a disaster for a substantial portion of the US population and by extension the US economy.
Food stamps, though many Conservatives rail against this, have a stimulative effect on the economy.
There should be no “but” there really. That is a big part of it. However, we’re looking at the same argument here. Of course infrastructure spending has fallen as a share of the economy since the 1950’s. There was a lot to do then that doesn’t have to be done now. On a side note, we’ve kinda hijacked this thread. You should write up a post on this, it’d be good to get some eyes on these ideas and bat it around!
I am for the abolition of agricultural subsidies, though I understand that this is a complicated trade issue and it isn’t as simple as it appears. The DOHA talks failed due to issues of global agricultural subsidies. Some of that may be due to politics, but there is often a problem of food security. I don’t know if that is nonsense, but I don’t know a good source to read about the issue.
You cannot stimulate the economy by taking money from one pocket and putting it in another, that doesn’t generate any growth. In the case of SNAP it actually creates less because you’re taking the money out of the pocket of one person, running it through a bureaucracy, and putting less money into the intended empty pocket. The government doesn’t “make” money, period. It can’t, it can only take it from some and give it to others. Sometimes in necessary but saying that it “generates” anything is fantasy.
I wanted Peter, Rob, and James to comment on China as a threat while linking it to infrastructure spending and the climate, but no one responded. I really wanted to hear their views on those issues.
It’s a good topic and we’ll try and spend some time on it on next week’s show.
When I took graduate microeconomics (my textbook was microeconomic theory by Mas-Colell, Whinston, and Green), a mathematical reason is giving for the effectiveness of redistribution from one person to another (given certain assumptions, of course).
Would you deign to bother answering the stated question (Was welfare reform in the 90’s a “disaster”?)
Then, move on to where you make the assumption that moving around the deckchairs somehow makes more deckchairs – because that’s what welfare and food stamps are. It simply seizes resources from one party and hands them to another party. There’s nothing creative about that act. It stimulates nothing. The party who had their stuff taken is deprived of potential consumption or investment so that a second party can consume or invest. So, unless you’re saying that there is a free lunch or that you get to create something out of nothing then it isn’t stimulative. End of discussion.
Next, you assume that there’s something wrong with poor people working. As far as I know, the best way to get un-poor is to work more, not less. Add to that the fact that poor people disproportionately benefit from income redistribution programs like Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and I see nothing wrong with asking them to work a little bit more in order to get access to them.