Also in Chiapas, a poor state that sends many migrants to the United States, María del Carmen Montufar has pooled money with her husband and other family members to wire financial assistance to her daughter Candelaria in North Carolina.
At one small bank in Chiapas that used to see money flowing in from the United States, more money is going out than coming in.So what's Obama gonna do? He's going to go on a fact-finding mission -- a nationwide tour -- one which will take months to complete. (Thanks, lambert.)
With the nation's unemployment rate at its highest level in 26 years, President Obama plans to bring together CEOs, small business owners and financial experts to sound out ideas for continuing to expand the economy and create jobs.In other words, he's going to go around the country looking for more YAFs to talk to. Well, it beats actually doing something.
And what's a YAF? That's my new pet acronym: YAF -- Yet Another Friedmanite. (As in Milton Friedman.)
Wherever you go in the United States, whenever you turn on the radio, you run into a YAF. You can find pro-war YAFs and anti-war YAFs, insider YAFs and counter-culture YAFs, right-wing YAFs and left-wing YAFs, atheist YAFs and fundamentalist YAFs. The Obama administration is at least 80% YAF. The anti-Obama teabag movement is 100% YAF. YAFs are the thesis and the antithesis -- and thus any conceivable synthesis must be a YAF synthesis. They are on every side of nearly every issue, yet they all serve the same purpose: They exist to tell you that Keynesianism is the problem, not the solution.
After what the YAFs did to Russia, Chile, Iraq and the United States, you'd think that their Miltonian movement would be discredited by now. But the YAFs, through some YAFfy magic, always manage to present themselves as the exemplars of an untried ideal. They've been spewing YAFfiness for decades, yet they always convey the shock of the new. And every disaster they have created is ascribed not to Friedmanism but to the lack thereof.
Your home's on fire? Pour on some gas. It'll put the flames out -- or so the YAFs keep telling us.
A subsidiary of the YAF infestation is the YAL (Yet Another Libertarian) phenomenon. The internet presences who foisted Obama on the world -- Moulitsas, Sullivan, Aravosis, DAH-link Arianna, and possibly Marshall -- all began as YALs. Maybe they still are.
China: Paul Krugman is one of the few prominent non-YAF voices out there. You should read his recent piece on China's intentionally weakened currency.
So picture this: month after month of headlines juxtaposing soaring U.S. trade deficits and Chinese trade surpluses with the suffering of unemployed American workers. If I were the Chinese government, I’d be really worried about that prospect.I'd be even more worried if I were an unemployed American worker. Oh, wait a minute: I am.
Unfortunately, the Chinese don’t seem to get it: rather than face up to the need to change their currency policy, they’ve taken to lecturing the United States, telling us to raise interest rates and curb fiscal deficits — that is, to make our unemployment problem even worse.And that's exactly what will happen. Obama is under all sorts of pressure not to institute another stimulus. Instead, all the conventional wisdom spewers insist that NOW NOW NOW is the time fix our unfixable deficit. And we need to raise interest rates NOW NOW NOW in order to fight inflation -- which doesn't exist. All of which means that SOON SOON SOON we will have 25% unemployment, maybe worse.
Okay. So if nobody in this country has a job, who will buy all that Chinese-produced crap filling up our Wal-Marts?
Or maybe...(Let us recall our first story, the one about Mexicans bailing out their relatives in the U.S.)
...maybe the Chinese want to keep the yuan weak in order to make sure that Chinese WalMarts don't fill up American-produced crap.
Did you know that there are WalMarts in China? The photo to your left depicts one in Dongguan.
I spent some time this morning doing a Google Earth flyover of Dongguan and Guangshou and environs. Yes, I know that there were some very sizable layoffs there recently. Still, just about everything there looks prosperous, sleek, modern, clean, well-designed, impressively-sized and newly-built. How is China able to do it? Maybe because the political culture has managed to stay relatively YAF-free. If we want to fix the trade imbalance, we need to flood the place with Chicago School graduates -- pronto.
Meanwhile, folks in Mexico are sending relief aid to their poor relations in the U.S...
Added note: Wow. Public sculpture in Dongguan is pretty hot. Although the Chinese may be moving ahead of us, at least one Chinese fellow seems happy to be behind.
9 comments:
Someone once compared the laissez-faire capitalist idealogues with the farmer who tried to train his horse to live without food. Every time he got one almost trained, it died. Milton Friedman once told Ted Kennedy that socialism had failed everywhere it had been tried, which is true. But that is true of Friedmanesque laissez-faire capitalism. Now, some of the true believers will say that it has never been tried. But then how do they know it will work? It works in theory, but everything works in theory.The test of a theory is does it work in the real world.
Socialism is a discredited 19th century ideology. No one seriously today advocates nationalizing the means of production. LF capitalim is also a discredited 19th century ideology, but a few haven't figured it out yet. All non-idiots today recognize the need for regulation, and the desireablity of a social welfare support system. The rest is detail and the details are important. That leaves the idiots, and you cannot argue with idiots. (Or you shouldn't anyway, a lesson I think it took Joseph a while to learn.)Unfortunately the idiots today comprise 20-30% of the population (most on the Right, some on the Left).
But if everyone believes in regulation and social welfare, then it does become a question of how much and what kind, and people can disagree on the details while still sharing basic values and goals.
But first we need to kill all the Republican.
Joe,
Four time in the past decade I've visited greater Guangzhou, China, where one of my brothers teaches English and another teaches golf to the new class of robber barons. The province just across the border from Hong Kong--Guandong, formerly known as Canton--is the manufacturing center of the world and the most bomming place on the planet. It's like "Blade Runner": World-class skyscrapers rising in rice paddies, impossible opulence, neon everywhere. Centralized authority allows the Chinese to level whole cities--or build new ones--with the stroke of a pen. (Hence the displacement of millions of peasants by the Three Gorges Dam project.) Yes, they have Wal-Marts, and 7-Elevens and a lot of KFCs. (The Colonel is practucally a demi-god.) But I rarely see American goods there--except for pirated DVDs--because we make almost nothing that the Chinese don't make cheaper and better for themselves.
Granted, they've got a huge pollution problem from all their factories and coal-burning power plants. But they are also investing heavily in solar, wind and hydro-electric technologies. They're thinking long-term--as they've done for thousands of years.
You can't go to China without coming to this conclusion: Game over.
Thanks for the report, TJ. And it can be confirmed by pretty much anyone with Google Earth. That whole area looks like -- well, like the way we always imagined The Future would look. Did you see the Crowne hotel in Science City? UnbeLIEVable!
But I know a way to bring it all down. We need to find a way to send them our most important export: CHICAGO SCHOOL ECONOMISTS!
Beyond that: Translate the works of Ayn Rand into Chinese, then air-drop millions of her books over the great Chinese universities.
We need to put together a Grover Norquist battalion to overrun Chinese intellectual life. For a mere $20 million, we could pay a dozen Austrian schoolers to learn Chinese and infiltrate Guangdong.
Also, they need some YAFfy conspiracy theorists on late-night radio. A brigade of Chinese Alex Joneses, capturing the crowds with sensational accusations.
I tells ya, we can have the whole place looking like Detroit within fifteen years!
We had the same discussion in this country about Japan 20 years ago.
China is reaching its Zenith now. But the Achilles heal of China is and always has been social unrest.It is not easy to order around all those people spread out over all that territory.
If unemployment rises just a few points people get quite upset, and the whole country goes into lock down mode. And if the economy is based on exports, and the standard of living keeps rising, then they will soon not be able to undersell their competition, and unemployment will have to rise.
Not to wish the Tibet stamping Chinese any ill will-but when unemployment starts to rise rapidly in China-well-what was that expression that was just used...game over.
I wonder what Robert would have thought of the self centered aspects the objectivists worship.
juvenile delinquent' is a contradiction in terms. `Delinquent' means `failing in duty.' But duty is an adult virtue -- indeed a juvenile becomes an adult when, and only when, he acquires a knowledge of duty and embraces it as dearer than the self-love he was born with. There never was, there cannot be a `juvenile delinquent.' Robert Heinleim's -Starship Troopers
What gets me about them is how they think people will behave rationally out of self interest, but then do everything in their power to prevent punishment for mis deeds. It has to fail on that accord alone. People will take unlimited risk with limited danger. Which is good in areas that are safe, but unfortuitous in arenas of piossible danger to societal bonds, such as the ones we have in a modern economy.
I apologise for my writing style and skills, I can talk better than I can write, my fingers simply can't keep up with my mouth.
purenoiz
BTW, Joeseph I just watched the German film der leben das anderen, about the stassi. Compare their action to what FB etc lays out, and the telecom protections, I thinkk we should be scared of this and any other administration. Is that Mcarthy knocking again?
If the Chinese were thinking long term "for centuries" how does that explain the situation they found themselves in when confronted by British capitalism 150 years ago ?
Chinese banking is held together by the export surplus. If exports collapse then their banking system does as well. Massive government investment can only continue as long as losses are papered over by that surplus.
This is why China will never listen to the West when it comes to yuan revaluation - and why confrontation is unavoidable. Unfortunately for China, they are resented by other Asian 'elites' as well as those in the West.
I was in China last May and TJ is right, there are unbelievable building booms going on. There is great prosperity, but there is still a lot of grinding poverty. I had the opportunity to go off the beaten path and even on the little islands an hour off the coast of Shanghai, there were vast empty condo developments that seemed to be built in anticipation of prosperity, but a lot of people were very, very poor, living in ancient huts amid piles of garbage, often side-by-side with modern buildings.
Everywhere you can see that the government is trying to employ as many people as possible, as there are women with giant brooms sweeping the squares, flowers everywhere that need tending. Even the highways in Shanghai and Beijing are decorated with flowers, with flower boxes even hanging on the rails of the overpasses. The Chinese love to decorate!
And yes, they need to keep working on the air pollution. The air is really thick in places.
I would love to go back again.
To commenter Purple (above): Chinese civilizaton has flourished not just for centuries but for more than three millennia. No other civilization on earth can compare to that kind of longevity. Protected by desert to the northwest, the Himalayas to the southwest, and the Pacific to the east, it flowered in relative isolation. Granted, when the Chinese empire opened up to Western powers like England, its resource were exploited; but by biding its time, China got back the now-propserous enclave of Hong Kong--for free--and China's economy has now leap-frogged England's. So who won? China's GDP is now third in the world, behind Japan and the U.S. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese have enough raw materials and a big enough labor force to be self-sufficient, like America in the 20th century. Yes, the Chinese are now affected by global economics, and they face the challenges of pollution and income inequality. But they've got the wherewithal to endure, including the world's largest army and vast reserves of the competitors' currency. They can and do wait for their opportunities.
In the 1970s, Chinese premier Zhou En-Lai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution. He famously replied: "It's too early to tell."
anon 9:37
The first thing Robert would do would be to take the "right" to vote away from people for being mere citizens and make it an "earned privilege".
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