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It’s a podcast about big things today! Our guest is Josh Rogin, author of Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the Twenty-First Century. He takes us through our predicament with that big, menacing foe in the Far East; and warns against the current American tendency to allow the conflict with China to become another stage for political squabbling amongst ourselves. He and the hosts contemplate and debate the extent to which Cold War parallels are precise and our thinking ought be revised. The fellas also get into big spending and the progressive distaste for majorities, big or small.
Music from this week’s podcast: Everybody Wants To Rule The World by Weezer
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And look at the price of shelter in a recession. It’s bad now, but this has been going on since the mid-1990s.
Same with education. Same with healthcare. Everything you were forced to buy keeps going up while we wipe out these jobs so some things can be cheaper.
Then you have a housing bubble blowup. Hopefully we aren’t any more broad asset bubble, now.
Everybody wonders why Socialism and populism is an issue today some reason.
This is the way this works. In the mid 90s after the Soviet Union fell, we should have switched to a totally libertarian deflationary economy. Then get all of our unfunded liabilities in order. Next, import deflation from somebody besides the fascist Chinese mafia. This all works with automation as well. Humane labor markets and global security at the same time.
Regarding an economy where you rent everything and a sharing economy, that is deflation. Deflation is nothing but progress through better purchasing power.
There are people in Europe that want to outlaw the sharing economy because inflationism is the only way you can have big government.
The GOP pays lip service to competition and lower prices, but they really don’t get how it works in reality. The Fed has to stop producing inflation and the whole economy needs to be opened way up. Libertarian everything. You could also have more immigration without so many social problems in this scenario.
The other thing is, inflationism which is what the left prefers even more than the GOP is actually harder on the environment. It wastes resources. If they want to save the planet, they should just have the central banks jack interest rates up to 15% instead of keeping them below inflation.
In reality the only way society is going to hold together is if they produce -10% real interest rates. The whole planet is going to do it.
While I accept the intended premise here, there are separate issues that render this claim *mostly* false. You said “so many”, so sure, there may be fewer issues (technically true!) driven solely by inflationary pressures, but this is not the large problem with immigration — especially the way we do it, inflation or no.
People would have more agency. They would be less reliant on government power and groups based on identity.
Having said that, I’m probably being too simplistic.
We don’t procreate enough FICA slaves, so somebody has to think of something. lol
In a deflationary economy, we don’t need the ever-expanding labor pool. We become — sustainable.
Population growth is a big component of GDP, but you are right, inflationism requires more, I think.
Part of what I have in mind is we need to catch up on unfunded liabilities.
I’m not the final word on this stuff.
I did 2 tours in China back in the day. People would ask me for investment advice with China. The only advice I ever gave was “Don’t”. China is indeed a mafia. No matter how much it may hurt, we need to start buying things made in the USA or somewhere other than China.
Further to Peter’s story about modern day students from China noticing the freedom of Google.
In the early 90’s, I studied with a Chinese student working on a master’s in business after working on a master’s or two in engineering. He said that once you left, you just tried to keep getting degrees because you never knew if you could get out again.
When asked what the major difference he saw between our countries was, he did not hesitate but his answer surprised me. “The only thing you kill here is the roach”. In China, if his family wanted chicken for dinner, they killed a chicken. In America people had no idea where things really came from, and I fear that his entire age cohort grasped that too and the “true communist believers” referenced at podcast’s end have us paying the price for our disconnected lives.
It took me a few seconds to remember where I know the name Josh Rogin from. I’ve never actually heard of the author, it’s the Indian dish Lamb Rogan Josh that I’m a fan of.
Re: CHY NA (although coincidentally, We-zhur is an official in the Animal Husbandry and Agricultural Affairs ministry.)
Man, you’d think a place with a Calvin Coolidge membership level, a speech-writer for Ronald Reagan, and surely some acquaintance with Hayek and von Mises would hear the answer to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like China?” when it’s coming out their mouths. That’s: Not much, it’s on its way to solving itself.
Line of reasoning: Money (and you always need more than you have) goes where it’s welcome. Capital is the sine qua non of productivity. Ditto Rule of Law. Ditto, knowledgable, capable, risk-taking citizens. Productivity is the sine qua non of prosperity. Prosperity is what keeps the guillotines in citizens’ garages and attics and a government in the funds to live large and talk big. Stomping all over sine qua nons doesn’t seem like a winning strategy for the CCP.
Two caveats. 1) You never know when our national lack of confidence and unfortunate tendency to both overthink and under-think things gets us past flirting with it to passionately embracing the same losing strategy. Recent interest in Industrial Policy and “Forward into the Past” trade policy are troubling. Support for free markets seems to evaporate with the slightest change in the weather. 2) Bad economic policy takes time to show results.
And then it takes a little longer for someone to figure out how to blame Trump for it.
Having worked for some years as a translator for Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, I was particularly interested in Josh Rogin’s reference to it. The newspaper is much like The New York Times, in that it is read by the intellectual class, which leans heavily to the left. Its writers put up a show of being “of the people,” but in fact they tend to come from elite universities and can be quite snobbish. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the Asahi trendily favored it all, though back then I was still a student and only know such from going through back volumes. Much later I remember translating a column about all the wonderful “reforms” going on in North Korea, including translations of Dickens and the opening of new amusement parks. Armchair Leninism, one might say, except that North Korea is more racial-fascist than anything else.
I wonder to what extent Communists in power really believe in Communism. They surely know that it doesn’t work. What does work is the brutal boot on the face, along with appeals to ethno-nationalism and promises of perks for those who cooperate with the system.
When I lived in South Korea over a half-century ago, I learned the Sino-Korean four-character phrase cheon-go-ma-bi (天高馬肥) ‘the sky is high, and the horses are stout’…It is an autumnal greeting that has much amused Americans as strangely esoteric. In fact, deriving from Chinese, it has a specific meaning, as a dire warning. When the summer rains ceased in the north and the ground hardened, the Huns would mount their well-fed horses and ride down south to rob and plunder. The Han peoples have long had to deal with their neighbors, and their policy is one of ruthlessness and a sense of cultural superiority: Rule or at least intimidate into submission. Where does it stop? It’s not clear. China claims the Senkaku Islands and will go on bullying Japan over the issue…Taiwan may well be doomed…Even Okinawa, which once paid tribute to China, may be threatened. It’s not Communism. It’s old-fashioned imperialism
The top 50 guys in China want to rip off their own people and the whole world. That’s what I think.
Most of them – if not all – seem to think that it just hasn’t been done CORRECTLY so far, but that THEY know how to do it right.
Yomiuri forever!
On the TPP discussion I was aghast at one opinion being stated that both candidates were against it in 2016 – one was, the other (Clinton) only after seeing polling on the issue changed their position. As well, the false choice set up of “pass TPP or Chine rules the day,” stinks. TPP stunk to high-heaven because it was no normal trade deal, which would have been three pages of setting up the free-trade parameters with the undersigned countries – standardizing percentages for various categories from fully “free”, to those with some amount of protectionist tariff, etc. Instead it was a massive 5,000 page monstrosity that created multiple independent bodies, gave sway to classic international state derp-partment interests that come captured (as thankfully James worried about aloud), was negotiated in secret until the final phase (classic take-it-or-leave-it leverage used by globalist marketers who care little about the countries involved), and all-in-all was a classic example of the elite managerial class of multi-national tycoons putting forth a plan that benefitted them first and foremost. Thankfully it was scuttled.
Most criticism you can find is from the left begging for more contingencies and force to be applied to the member states and their policies when it came to “workers rights” and “the environment” – and much of it to back-door policy here domestically that they couldn’t pass through Congress.
“Let there be free trade between X & Y” – Now that’s a free trade deal, anything else delves into picking winners and losers.
What should we do now? Bite the bullet. Cut all trade with China effective almost immediately. Cut trade with any nation that acts as a through-put for Chinese goods. Yes it would be chaotic at first, but the end result would meet with those previously mentioned Chinese demographic, monetary, and governance problems that are going to come to a head and be far better for not just this country but many other nations in the world. Also, start recognizing the various sub-states of China as autonomous regions under the “bamboo curtain” of a Totalitarian Communist China. Make movies where the good Chinese people are under the brutal thumb of the Chi-Com government. Like USSR was the “bad guy” in the 80s, so also the Chi-Coms today. Screw that government six ways from Sunday and welcome their sub-states into the world community as the Paper Tiger crumbles.
/rant off
I thought surely you would know Weezer, if just for these lyrics from the song Buddy Holly:
“Ooh-wee-ooh, I look just like Buddy Holly
Oh oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore”
That has Minneapolis written all over it…
Absolutely!
I’ve been doing some more thinking about the wise Peter Robinson said…I remember accounts of how well the members of the Soviet elite lived and Jiang Qing, Madame Mao, who wanted flashy dresses for herself and drabness for everyone else. Still, what may seem like cynicism and hypocrisy may really be double-think, which is arguably much more dangerous…It has often been said that shrewd gangsters kill no more than those they think must be killed. Ideological fanatics, on the other hand, kill for the sake of killing.
A quick comment on Rob’s iPhone printers. This is the first I’ve heard of them, but assuming they’re not Star Trek level replicators that can just shimmer a phone into existence then they need input materials of some sort. Resin and solder and some fancy aluminum nanoparticle based ink for the conductors certainly. Capacitors and the camera assembly and the computer chips off of a pick-and-place machine. All these things will be made in factories of their own. Replacing the final assembly line with a printer doesn’t completely eclipse the whole manufacturing process.
(You can’t just say “printers all the way down” either. I don’t know about all the things, but I know enough about turning sand into semiconductor grade silicon into transistors and circuits to tell you that it’s going to be best done in factories for some time to come.)
And don’t fool yourself that a totalitarian government is in any way conducive to successful industry. They’re very good at saying “You thousand people, you’re no longer needed in product inspection. Move across town and get into canal digging.” They’re very bad at deciding which canals are necessary, or whether product inspection was so unnecessary to begin with.
The Baltic White Sea Canal for example. lol