Lots of people from Thomas Friedman to Barack Obama wish the US were more like China. I thank God every day it is not. Slashdot has a story and comments about a derailment of the high speed bullet train that led to numerous dead and injured, and coaches falling off a bridge. Only a few months too, after Railways Ministry officials expressed concerns that safety standards had been ignored in building the high speed train network. The claim of course was retracted, but undoubtedly true.
Winning the future, Obama's "WTF" slogan (no I am not kidding) requires more than building up pirated technology in a slap-dash manner, cheaply. It means innovation. Which in turn requires … property rights widely respected and widely dispersed. China is again regressing to its Eunuchs-on-command-from-the-Emperor mode. Brilliant men either make a few, poorly understood breakthroughs (gunpowder, magnetic compasses) or copy something else, which then goes stagnant. Since there is no one at a deep-wide level to push technology ever further.
The West did not invent: gunpowder, magnetic compasses, paper money, printing, civil exams, and a lot of other things borrowed from China and India. But what the West did do, far better, was push advances constantly. Relentlessly, generation after generation. So that every twenty years there were newer and better navigation devices, charts, understanding of navigation, time-pieces, calculation log-books, and weapons. Made possible not by people under control of the Emperor, or the Central Party Oligarchy, but by many competing, widely distributed, always on the make ordinary folk trying their best to improve their lot every day.
The West beat the best brains on the planet. The West never had Court Eunuchs to match the Chinese Emperor, or the Ottoman's scholars, or the ones in India. But it did have the Beretta Family, and the Caslon family, and the Caxton family, and the Wright family, and many more. All building on the work of others, to constantly improve technology to their own advantage. China has nothing like it.
There are many talented people in China. But their innovations, their designs, will go nowhere for their own advantage. No one is going to invent anything for the glory of the Emperor, or Central Party Committee, and the advantage of Red Princelings. Instead that lack of ability to better one's own self except by examination and rising in the Emperor's (or Central Party Committee) service means a mind-bending bureaucracy stifling anything other than stealing some other culture's advances.
That's not winning the future. More like heading for a crash, as the ability to work smarter with resources diminishes. As Jim Chanos famously observed, the USSR grew tremendously from 1946 up through the late 1970's. Then productivity hit a wall. All the cement had been poured. All the villages electrified. All the people taught to read. All the highways built. All the peasants sent to technical school. And productivity fell, year after year, in accelerating fashion. Because fundamentally, people won't work hard for anyone but themselves. Slaves may fear the whip, but avoid any serious work for their masters. Meanwhile the genius of Napoleon, a former peasant himself, was to make French peasants small landholders. Give a man a piece of property, no matter how mean, and a chance at a family of his own he can improve, no matter how small, and he'll fight to the death for it.
If you wonder how Napoleon managed all those victories, against so many, for so long, before luck ran out, that's how.
The US has many faults, but it is not China. And for that I thank God.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
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10 comments:
"Fundamentally, people won't work hard for anyone but themselves. Slaves may fear the whip, but avoid any serious work for their masters. Meanwhile the genius of Napoleon, a former peasant himself, was to make French peasants small landholders. Give a man a piece of property, no matter how mean, and a chance at a family of his own he can improve, no matter how small, and he'll fight to the death for it."
However, as you've commented in other entries, due to rampant hypergamy (among other factors), increasing numbers of men are being shut out of the sexual/marriage market. If these disenfranchised men have little or no incentive to work hard (Why should they work themselves into an early grave if they have little or no marriage prospects and no children to support?), then many of these men will work just diligently enough to fend for themselves. This will help bring about Western civilization's end just as surely as the proverbial barbarians at the gate.
Utopianists often claim "If we only had more X or less Y, we'd be perfect."
Almost always more X is more government intrusion, taxes, regulation and rules; less Y is usually freedom, and often consequences (think bailouts).
Thank heaven we have elections to clean up messes like we have now.
Excellent point Anonymous. As a man who has had very little luck on the dating/marriage scene, I would very much like to go Galt, and watch those Alpha-seekers turn into crazy cat ladies when they age out of the dating market.
The PRC is quite royally screwed demographically, much worse than almost all "Western" states, save possibly Japan. The one-child policy is now irreversible and the smart people in the cities have more-or-less stuck with it, while the countryside has not.
So the people having all the kids feel - pretty justly - left out of the Great Chinese Gravytrain. Go to rural China, it's like the 17th century.
This is not a recipe for stability, my friends. The PRC will, indeed, grow old before it grows rich.
I won't even go into the fact that the Reds had destroyed all aspects of traditional Chinese morality so it's a society of unashamed money-grubbing of the most vile sort: imagine a billion-plus of the nastiest Ostjuden crowded together: nice.
Only worry to have is whether the PRC doesn't do something really stupid, ie provoke an East Asian War, as it goes down the tube. Quite possible.
The USA is screwed, don't misunderstand, but far less than the PRC.
This is your kind of thing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvy5UAD43Hg
Opinion?
Whiskey,
You're SO close to the root of the problem here. You danced around it with one sentence and then never another mention. The REAL thing to work for is private property rights.
In past posts, your argument has been basically that beta males should be respected because they are a good tax base and will help build civilization. In other words, beta males make compliant servants for the powers that be.
If we had true private property rights, there would be no such thing as the welfare state. End the welfare state and the little bitches that are running around screwing dirtbags will start to have real consequences staring them in the face. If you want betas to get more poon, the way forward is not to point out that they make great servants. The way forward is to declare that no man has to live for the sake of another, either through literal servitude or through state-sanctioned servitude.
"Thank heaven we have elections to clean up messes like we have now."
You're joking, right?
Every election we've had since 1988, we've been more fucked than the last one. There is literally no chance that any election will produce a leader capable of solving the problems we have.
Off the current topic but quoting the Norwegian shooter:
"Muslim girls were off limits to everyone, even the Muslim boys. The only available
“commodity” at this point was therefore ethnic Norwegian girls, referred to as “whores”.
Due to the tolerance indoctrinated through Norwegian upbringing - girls aren’t brought
up to be sceptics, racists or anti-immigrant, just like most boys. They are all brought upto be very tolerant. As a result, many ethnic Norwegian girls, especially in Muslim
dominated areas, despise ethnic Norwegian boys because they consider them as weak
and inferior with lack of pride, seeing as they are systematically “subdued” by the
“superior Muslim boys”. Ironically, Muslim boys are raised to view Norwegian girls as
inferior “whores”. Their only purpose is to bring pleasure until the Muslim guys are
around 20-25 when they will find a pure, “superior” Muslim girl, a virgin. At this point,
the ethnic Norwegian “whores” is discarded, and most of the girls go back to their old
“tribe”. They are welcomed back in the name of tolerance."
More: http://www.kevinislaughter.com/wp-content/uploads/2083+-+A+European+Declaration+of+Independence.pdf
It is not that China is on the rise, but that the West is in decline. Everything the West developed and perfected over the last one hundred years was gifted to China via joint ventures, expats in China, and American universities educating Chinese.
Left alone the Chinese will only stagnate and decline. They are grossly incompetent and have a very overrated view of their abilities and accomplishments.
Sherwood Smith
South China
The Chinese have higher IQ then whites or blacks.
Race & Intelligence
Something in their education and political system held them back. If they take enough of US technology and education they will prosper.
High IQ, huge masses, add to that the degeneration of the US, dysgenics, etc and things look bleak for the US.
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