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Sunday, January 23, 2011

RE ROBERT REICH NYT RECOVER OUR SPENDING POWER BRAUDEL THE MEDITERRANEAN NOT THE WILD WEST

Income redistribution, taken in isolation, makes some sense. 


The rest of it is mostly the same globalist consumerist model nonsense we see even from ostensibly 'progressive' pundits. 


They are essentially one trick ponies: blobalism is good. 
Let's just try to tweak it, and somehow everything will turn out all right.


Rather, we should discourage (even attempt to prevent), not encourage, further or high speed growth in China, for the most obvious military, commercial, financial, resource, and environmental reasons; just as we should have in Japan, which pundits seem everywhere now to be analogizing to China, deja vu, for very similar reasons. 


(The pundits say 'like Japan 20 years ago', but 50 years back, for Japan, would be closer, if you do the research.


Pundits will say China has almost all of certain metals. One reason is that we did not bother to mine them somewhere else.) 


Even back then, 50 years ago, Japan was playing three sides in the Cold War behind our back, investing in China, its ostensible cold war enemy.


Here is a quote from The Coming Conflict With China


'"(As for the United States) for a relatively long time it will be absolutely necessary that we quietly nurse our sense of vengeance....We must conceal our abilities and bide our time."--Lieutenant General Mi Zhenyu, Vice Commandant, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing.'


For Japan, similar quotes can be found. 
See also  The Coming War With Japan, especially "The Grand Strategy of Japan".


As I have pointed out, as well as their own pundits, Japan was allowed to hollow out the American industrial base (ie Japan's own ostensible defense umbrella industrial base). On this topic, a passage from The coming War With Japan is apposite, see p. 


China has been in process of squashing it flat. No more umbrella. 


It is not 'the world is flat', but the American producer economy, that is flat.


There is no trade and investment learning curve in the US.


Matter of fact, 'high growth' per se should be discouraged, everywhere. 


Especially, why grow your future enemies, even if it seems a great bargain today?


Reich, and American elites, both share the view that it is basically a hunky dory situation, and all we need to do is a little trade tweaking, and some domestic income redistribution, in order to continue to high grow these developmental regimes. They think of the world as one of open opportunity, on the model of the American West, where capitalism can create its own sources of opportunity as it goes along.


Think instead of the Mediterranean world, as described by Braudel, a world of relative scarcity surrounded by hungry societies each striving, since ancient times, Rome, Carthage, Persia, etc., for a livelihood. See also Clifford A. Wright, A Mediterranean Feast, a cookbook with some history included.


That is emphatically not how it will turn out, either for American elites, or for American middle or lower class persons.


Term search also Chalmers Johnson, Prestowitz, etc. 


Johnson, Japan: Who Governs? Esp. Ch. 5 is useful, for Americans who cannot understand why their political system and economy do not flourished, are now flat; in spite of, and crushed by, all this great blobalization.


People like James Grant would not agree with any of this. I use his ideas, re currencies, when they happen to agree with mine.



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