Tag: China

Categories
free trade & free markets ideological culture national politics & policies

China Syndrome, 2012

The two major presidential candidates, incumbent Obama and challenger Romney, must spend their final weeks of the campaign appealing to

  1. Members of their respective parties disappointed enough to stay home on election day — or vote the dreaded “Third Party” ticket;
  2. Independent voters apt to find something distasteful about both candidates;
  3. The apathetic and the uninformed.

How to appeal to all three groups simultaneously? Well, go for the old standby: fear and hatred of foreigners.

This year, it’s the Chinese.

Romney started the China-​bashing by calling our Chinese trading partners “cheaters.” Apparently he is much vexed about how the Chinese don’t respect established intellectual property rights, “stealing” our technology, “everything from computers to fighter jets.” Of course, this mainly happens after “we” set up manufacturing plants for that technology there. He charged that President Obama has not deigned to “stand up to China.”

Earlier, he had accused China of manipulating its money in its favor. He seems to have dropped that, perhaps out of embarrassment — our own Fed’s monetary manipulations, after all, dwarf China’s.

The Obama campaign responded by avoiding the intellectual property issue just as Romney now avoids the monetary one, calling Romney himself a “cheater.” You see, in his Bain Capital days, Romney invested in firms that relocated jobs to “low wage countries like China.” Romney, we are told, has “never stood up to China.”

By which is meant: Romney engaged in globalism and opposed protectionism.

Is Mr. Obama really suggesting that prosperity will come if we shrink from global competition and enact barriers to international trade in goods and services?

The biggest problem the U.S. economy faces isn’t Beijing; it’s Washington.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
ideological culture too much government

Moving to China?

Venture capitalist Eric X. Li, in an op-​ed for the New York Times, “Why China’s Political Model Is Superior,” credits the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre with producing the “stability” that “ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity.”

As for America, Li explains that our problem is an “expanded” political franchise, “resulting in a greater number of people participating in more and more decisions.”

“Elected representatives have no minds of their own and respond only to the whims of public opinion as they seek re-​election,” Li informs, and “special interests manipulate the people into voting for ever-​lower taxes and higher government spending, sometimes even supporting self-​destructive wars.”

Mr. Li points to California and predicts an American “future” of “endless referendums, paralysis and insolvency.”

But wait a second … Americans have no initiative or referendum powers at the national level. The people didn’t vote for this level of taxes, spending, war or massive debt – our elite political leaders did that. Too much control by the people? Hardly. Too little.

Note that the national government most affected by initiatives and referendums is Switzerland, which also has the world’s highest per capita income.

But, as Li tells us, “China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests …” After all, “political rights … should be seen as privileges to be negotiated based on the needs and conditions of the nation.”

Those negotiations have left Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo in a Chinese prison.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets national politics & policies

Blame China

The Great Depression was made “great” by government mismanagement. 

Political action, first under Hoover and then under FDR, made things a whole lot worse. And it wasn’t just the Democrats’ misguided New Deal barrage of regulation, cartelization, and general anti-​business central planning. The Hoover Era Smoot-​Hawley Tariff, a huge Republican reassertion of high-​barrier protectionism, crippled international markets and devastated the one industry it was meant, especially, to help: agriculture. 

Protectionism is the idea that government should outrageously harm domestic consumers to “protect” domestic producers. And politicians, often thinking they must “do something” (i.e., “anything”) often feel the push to “save us all” by erecting barriers to trade. Since the crash of 2008, I’ve kept an eye on our Washington insiders, to see if they’d try to revive Thirties-​style self-​destructive nostrums.

Well, we’ve got a sighting. 

Congress is gearing up for some anti-​Chinese protectionism. An unfortunately bipartisan movement is festering there, saying China’s yuan is too valuable, making trade “unfair” for American producers. The Senate seems bent on passing the Currency Exchange Rate Oversight Reform Act.

But, according to Daniel Ikenson, what’s really going on is politics: Faced with “public approval ratings hovering in the low-​to-​mid teens, an embattled Congress is looking for plausible scapegoats for the dismal state of U.S. economic affairs.”

This is not sophisticated economic theory. It’s not conscientiously developed public policy.

It’s grasp-​at-​anything grandstanding.

And it could do a whole lot of harm.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
free trade & free markets

Tire Trade War, Tiring

Political folly comes around, again and again, like a puncture in a rapidly deflating tire as you drive down the freeway. The end is never good.

President Obama and congressional Democrats pushed a tariff hike on China-​made tires, up to 35 percent — and the WTO okayed it. They excuse their action because they wish to “retaliate” against China for its alleged monetary “manipulations” — manipulations that bear remarkable resemblance to our own Federal Reserve’s policies, by the way — which they say cause our current trade imbalance.

And, like non-​economists everywhere, these buffoons judge the trade deficit a horrible thing. The fact that U.S. consumer’s get great benefit from lower-​priced goods coming from China, and can — as a result of less expensive, Chinese-​made tires – afford to replace their tires more often, thereby saving lives and health-​care costs, doesn’t appear in politicians’ protectionist arguments.

It’s the economy that’s making our representatives stupid, of course. Blaming foreign competition is an easy out, when times get tough. It helps you avoid blaming your own country’s regulations, taxes, and (ahem) monetary policy.

This blame game is nothing new. The Smoot-​Hawley Tariff was pushed through early in the Great Depression, and it made a lot of sense to … politicians.

But the the trade wars the infamous tariff engendered became a major factor in making the Great Depression so Great.

Our politicians, reviving tired old policies — regarding tires, no less — merely make matters worse. Greatly worse.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
First Amendment rights general freedom

Searching for Google’s China Policy

Google took flak a few years ago when it announced that it would cooperate with Chinese censorship to operate a Chinese version of the Google search engine. The company’s top brass wrung their hands about the decision, since it seemed to clash with Google’s official “do no evil” policy.

In January, Google and other large companies suffered a major cyber attack apparently originating in China. In Google’s case, the target of the assault was the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Further investigation in the weeks since then has tended to confirm that the Chinese government sponsored the attack.

In response to the attack and further assaults on freedom of Internet speech in China, Google said that it was “no longer willing to continue censoring” its search results. It said that it would shut down Google​.cn if the government would not let it provide unfiltered results.

Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb reports that Google​.cn is still censoring its search results. The Chinese government isn’t about to cave. 

So why hasn’t Google left China?

Sure, it would be disruptive. People would lose their jobs. But in January’s   statement, Google seemed to be taking a belated but praiseworthy stand on principle. They should follow through. If there’s anything worse than doing evil, it’s publicly repenting it and then continuing to do evil as if nothing had happened.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
general freedom too much government

China’s Not-​so-​Great Wall

The Chinese government has been tightening its cyber-​noose. Its officials fear  the ideas that can proliferate so easily on the Internet. So they’re making it ever harder for citizens to use the Net — even to visit nonpolitical websites.

Multiple-​choice question: The new restrictions mean that Web surfers will have a harder time a) viewing pornography; b) watching streaming TV shows; c) starting an Internet-​based business or personal web site; d) criticizing the Chinese government; or e) all of the above? 

The answer is “all of the above.”

This year, China has blocked Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many other sites. The latest round of restrictions has resulted in the shutdown of some 700 homegrown sites. Chinese dictocrats talk about combating pornography or piracy to justify restrictions that have a much wider scope. But they also freely admit their eagerness to block the flow of ideas they call “bad,” which is to say, inconvenient to themselves. China’s public security minister complains that the Internet “has become an important avenue” for “anti-​China” forces.

Beijing can’t stamp out the Internet altogether. But it can certainly keep cooking up new ways to boil it down to an easier-​to-​control (or comprehend) size. 

Chinese citizens who are determined to keep resisting the tyrants need more and better technology to circumvent the firewalls, and to protect their own anonymity and privacy.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.